


Tall Tales

by kay_cricketed



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brief thought of suicide, F/M, Gen, M/M, Temporary Character Death, but it's also fairly vasquez-centric, despite vasquez's best attempts to make it otherwise, ensemble fic where everyone gets a spin, semi-graphic description of corpses and bad wounds, some small moments of period racism, the one where they're all tall tales (and some of those tales are more eldritch than others), violence similar to what's in the film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-05 20:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 46,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15870852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: When Rose Creek falls to the organic blight that is Bartholomew Bogue and his Blackstones, Emma Cullen rides out in search of men who are more than blood and bone and tooth.  In the golden age of tall tales, she finds some of the tallest to lead her ragtag army, each of them with their own reason for being there.While Sam Chisolm searches for some form of justice and Goodnight Robicheaux struggles to keep his death toll in check, the silver-tongued whirlwind that is Joshua Faraday finds himself drawn to a good-natured vaquero with his own share of secrets.(Meanwhile, Billy isn't getting enough alcohol to deal with any of this.)





	1. he was cursed with a name like cullen (to be culled, to have already ended)

**Author's Note:**

> So, I know there are a ton of these AU retelling-the-film stories, but apparently I'm a sucker who can't resist creating _one more_ for the road. Sort of inspired by the 1995 film _Tall Tale_ and by my own love of the stories of Paul Bunyan and the like growing up. Expect a dash of tall tale mixed with folklore and archetype, along with a pinch of eldritch horror, because why not? Some of the dialogue has been taken from the film, but I've tried to make it more original content than not, particularly as the story goes on.
> 
> Anyhow, hopefully someone enjoys reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Shout-out of thanks to [thesummoningdark](https://clairecreatesathing.tumblr.com/), my amazing artist, who really stepped up to bat and picked one of my favorite moments to illustrate!

**i.**

 

Her husband’s blood filled between her fingers and welled like tears. The dirt beneath his body, the very land they’d worked so hard to develop, became black and soured from his leftovers. “Don’t you go from me,” Emma Cullen begged, although she knew this slow quieting of breath like a close sibling—had felt beneath her fingers, under her father’s tutelage on the farmstead, the way a lamb bleated without noise before settling and becoming, not cold, but an _absence_. “Don’t you go,” she said, but he was gone.

He was gone.

“Come on,” Teddy Q said, “come on. Come with us.” He had Emma by the arms, and he pulled her up. She didn’t need his pushing and pulling. She freed herself of him and swayed on the road in the billow of dust and smoke from the church. The air was acrid, on fire all the way down into her belly.

Someone was crying—Bonnie Mayharm? Or was it Leni? Noise buzzed through her ears like an angry shot.

“We can’t stay here,” Teddy Q said to her. “They might—he might come back. For the rest of us.”

Emma stared past him, his young golden face and his shoulder hunched high. She looked right on through to the Sheriff’s bowed head and the hat in his hand and ash on his boots. She looked on through to Bogue as he ambled to the horizon, flanked on either side by his Blackstones’ tall fingered shadows, and him, a reedy strip of flesh born on spite that remained unburned by the pistol that killed her husband. The heat of the flames was on her back. Already Matthew’s blood was drying, crisping up her wrists like gloves.

“Lord, give us guidance,” Preacher whispered. No matter how small his voice, they had always heard it. No matter the racket. No matter.

“I am in need of more than guidance, Preacher,” said Emma, shaking head to toe. She felt as though something titanic was ballooned inside her, squeezing past her bones and ligaments. “I am _in need_ of much more.”

They heard it in her voice then: some quivering, growing wildfire of a thing. Some absolute, God-walking and iron-forged spit of a thing.

 

**ii.**

 

Bogue came onto their town like a plague. He crept first into the small places between floorboards and glass bottles. He festered. He branched out until he was in every room, in every conversation, on every piece of land. He ate dinner at their elbows and bit their babies goodnight. He claimed the gold mines, then the water, then the businesses, then the people, so assuredly and with such entitlement that to question his actions felt tantamount to accusing the Lord Almighty of trespass. Where he walked, his boots sunk into the dust a foot deep, leaving his stamp on the earth. Where he spoke, milk and cheese curdled.

Maybe he was only a man, but the whisperings started fervently, bloating alongside his ambitions, and by the time he held Rose Creek by its neck, Emma thought he’d become more than man. More than most men, at least.

It would take more than most men to kill him, too. More than a town’s worth. More than an army. 

“Dunno what else there is,” said Teddy Q, riding alongside her with his hat spilled on down his back. His nose was sun-kissed pink. “Preacher said we were to use the money to get some men.”

“More bodies won’t help us,” Emma said, not bringing up the many shams and down-on-their-luck sorts they’d tried and failed to hire already. The name of Bogue had traveled far; no one was willing to die for their meager coin. She swayed with her mare, feeling its sweat like her own against her calves. “We need somethin’ the likes of Johnny Ride-About. The Maple Valley Marksman and his hawk, the High Whistler. Pete Yassler—they say he can lasso a bullhead sliding through water.”

“What? Them’s tall tales, Mrs. Cullen.”

“I met one once.”

“Met a what?”

“A tall tale,” she said. “Nothing like it. You just know. Swoop in your stomach. Sun too bright in your eyes. Whole world unbends itself. I was a girl. He hooked a cane over the highest branch in the apple tree and bent it down, trunk and all, until I could pick the fruit. Everything he needed was always in reach.”

Teddy Q rode silent for a while. “But you were a little girl,” he said finally, wiping his shiny forehead with a patchwork handkerchief.

“Do you think I was the kind of girl who put much stock in stories, Teddy?”

She saw him bite down on his mouth, but it couldn’t hide his smile. “No, ma’am.”

“A man who had everything he needed in reach. That’s the kind we need to be lookin’ for—someone bigger n’ Bogue. Someone meaner, and smarter, and faster.”

Teddy Q pondered on that, but he seemed to come around to the very conundrum Emma herself was locked in. “All right, but how do you find a man of that sort? Much less a fighting force of them?”

Emma looked up at the blue expanse of sky, tufted in cloud and not overly much else. Maybe once, she would’ve said _you pray_. But Matthew was dead, the graceful way he steepled his fingers lost to her, and so instead they simply rode on until a town emerged from the dunes and broke the way in two.

 

**iii.**

 

Sam Chisolm was a duly sworn warrant officer of the circuit court in Wichita, Kansas. He was a licensed peace officer in the Indian Territories, Arkansas, Nebraska, and seven other states. For the past year, he’d been hunting wanted men in the low-lying mountains and carnivorous sun-carved lands of California, a fact for which thieves and murderers ought to have been a-fearing. Sam Chisolm always got his man. It was without exception; like some divine providence, like a recurrent chorus, no matter the trail he took to get there or how long it took to bag him, Sam Chisolm always got his man.

This was a man born to hold justice true to itself, they said. He had a family once. Like so many other settlers, he had a mother and sisters who made a hard life seem softer around the edges. The story varied as to the details of their deaths, but everyone knew those deaths were hard, and everyone knew the story itself ended in bloodshed and isolation, with Sam Chisolm furiously raking through hallowed ground to bury his beloveds, his neck collared in inflamed scar tissue. _And then_ , they said, _he got to walkin’._

And he walked, and he walked.

And he got to work.

There were a lot of tall tales about Sam Chisolm. Once, it was said, he tracked former Deputy Wade Darnhook, a fella who had killed his bride-to-be on account of her affections being elsewhere—and then the rest of the wedding party on account of sheer orneriness—across the southern Rockies for eight days and nine nights without rest. On the ninth day, Sam Chisolm stopped his stubborn-fool walking and realized he couldn’t reach his quarry at the speed he was making. But Sam Chisolm always got his man. He made camp, waited until the heels of night came close, and doused his fire. With no moon to watch, his body stretched out, becoming a great loping dark fallen upon the land, and he stepped from mountaintop to mountaintop at a nice easy pace. He traveled that way from twilight to dawn’s first wink, and then he put his foot down outside of Darnhook’s camp.

Once, it was said, Sam Chisolm followed the Marty Quartet—four of the leanest, angriest brothers to ever make their momma expire on a steady diet of shame—from the coastline all the way up to where redwoods towered overhead like petrified giants. They went by boat and never made fire so as to provide no smoke to his roving gaze. But Sam Chisolm didn’t need any smoke and he always got his man, or men, as it were. He rode steadfast in the sands on his horse, a real beauty with satin flesh and wild mane, and reasoned, “They can’t go out; they can only come in. No man of the west wants to live in that much water you can’t ever drink.” 

When the Marty Quartet took to the shore again, Sam Chisolm was there, cooking sausages veined in fat over the fire. One of the brothers died, it was said, but only because he slipped on the tidal rocks and cracked his head open like an egg. The others froze in their tracks, stricken with the sudden fear that no matter what shore they swept into, Sam Chisolm would be waiting on their arrival, the very coastline shaped to the cavern of his mouth. He might very well swallow them whole if they made him hungry enough.

Besides, what could you do with a man who rode faster than the waves, who would follow you to the end of this good earth? _If Sam Chisolm is after you, you’re already a caught man,_ they said. _He rides into town, and you pray you ain’t on the paper in his pocket._

Sam Chisolm did have an awful lot of paper in his pocket. Some slips of paper were warrants; he also had a receipt for a saloon room that was clean and always in the right place and the right time, so he could remember its name. He wasn’t a gambling man, but he still had a rash of winnings that he was holding onto for some folks. Sometimes people liked to give him things, for safe keeping. They always got back what was theirs.

When he rode into Silver Maids, he had one warrant in his pocket that mattered. Mr. Daniel Harrison was hanging on the town like a waterlogged festoon—Sam Chisolm could _feel_ him, taste the weight of him bulging, over-fermented—and it just so happened, he was worth some coin.

And well—you know what they said about Sam Chisolm.

 

**iv.**

 

“These cards are _shit_ ,” said Faraday. He slapped the traitors on the table, unmindful of the whiskey soaked into the wood.

His fellow partakers glanced at each other before tossing their recent hands onto the pile. They had a weird way of not looking him in the eye—unusual, Faraday thought in amusement, because typically the problem was looking away. “Deal,” said the ugly one, although they all had a sort of ugliness about them, pasty despite the sun, like melting dough streaked with sweat.

Cards were swapped and flicked. His drink was getting low. _Not much of a story to this one_ , Faraday thought, checking his new hand with a cluck of his tongue. Some days were like that. Some days were just days, not tales.

“Now, let’s try and keep this civil,” he said, because there was always a chance for a decent brawl if he pushed the right buttons. Brawls most certainly made Faraday feel better when alcohol, money, and fame were spent. “I’m lookin’ at you, Lucas. Don’t think I forgot your clumsy attempt at palming an ace yesterday.”

Lucas glowered at him. “I weren’t palming no ace, Faraday.”

“It magically danced its way up your sleeve?”

“I wouldn’t be talking if I were you,” said Caleb, who was a mean cuss if Faraday ever met one. “Just ‘cause we don’t know how you do it, don’t mean we don’t know a cheat when we see ‘im.”

Faraday pressed a hand over his heart. “Me? A cheat? Gentlemen, you wound me. Grievously, it must be said.”

_Grievously_ , echoed the boots-on-stairs-on-boards as a new thing, a big thing, made its way into the saloon. _Grievously, grievously._

Faraday looked up from his cards, interest caught. So did just about every soul in the saloon, which went from bustling to silent as the grave in the span of a second. Each man and woman was caught on the _clip_ and the _da-dunk_. From the corner of his eye, Faraday saw Caleb clutch at his pistol with milked-out knuckles. 

A man—but not a man—walked into the saloon and went straight up to the barman. “Good day,” he said, measuredly. He had dark skin and a straight-laced look about him, his hair trimmed neat and belt notched.

“Well, I’ll be,” Faraday murmured. He reckoned he had a name for the not-man.

So did others. “What the hell is _he_ doing here?” hissed Lucas, finger twitching nervously against his glass of warming rye.

“Shot of busthead,” said Sam Chisolm, as Faraday lived and breathed. Well then. Living legends liked busthead. That was certainly worth the dullness of the day to learn.

The barman was a— _big fella_ , thought Faraday, its echo strange in his bones— bright-eyed, slow-burn menace by Faraday’s measure. Still, he was surprised when the barman lied through his teeth. “Sorry, cowboy. We don’t carry that kind. Best you check elsewhere.”

Sam Chisolm put two coins on the table. So dead was the saloon, Faraday reckoned he could hear the grooves of the coins complain against the wood grain. “In that case, I’ll have a double.”

The barman looked at the coin, then at Sam Chisolm. “Don’t need that, whatever it’s for.”

“I’m looking for somebody,” said Sam Chisolm. He was only getting heavier somehow, filling the space between each person, expanding into the rafters and the pleasure rooms aloft. “A particular somebody. Big fella. ‘Bout your size. Near enough your face. Surlier in portrait.”

Faraday put his hand on Ethel, his constant companion, where she lay sweetly on the table in Sunday rest. He shook his head at Caleb, whose trigger finger was getting mighty antsy. This was no business for him to get into.

“Sometimes,” said Sam Chisolm, “he goes by the name Powder Dan. He’s a killer of men and their sons. Hurt himself some women, too. Ruined a few homesteads in Nebraska in his time, with his matches. Don’t think he has much taste for the moniker given to him—and that’s why I gave it to him, no mistake.”

“I don’t know anyone named Dan,” said the barman. He couldn’t seem to look away from Sam Chisolm’s eyes, and in the warped mirror backslash on the bar behind him, Faraday could see why. No end in those eyes. The pupils went on forever and a day longer, past the rattling bones of the world.

“Powder Dan,” said Sam Chisolm.

“Not him either.” The barman stopped, looking confused. He opened a bottle and poured a shot into a waiting glass. Wrung his hands on the bottleneck. “Why you gotta call him that? I got a family. I’m a different man now. That wasn’t ever my name. Did better work than that. That was no name to give me.”

“You’ll have no name in the hellfire,” Sam Chisolm told him. “You hear it callin’ from beneath, Powder Dan?”

Like an animal in its final scurry, desperate to heave out from the throat sucking it down, the barman reached under the counter for his piece. Nasty bit of work Faraday had seen these last few days: sawed off barrels and buckshot.

(One crack, like the bolt of the Man himself. Clean shot. Whole lot of screaming and panic and stampeding out the swinging doors, but Faraday only watched the length of Sam Chisolm’s throat work as he swallowed the swill Powder Dan had poured for him in the last second of his life. “Ah,” he said in deep satisfaction. “I was parched.”)

 

**v.**

 

When the saloon was empty, Sam Chisolm carefully and deliberately pocketed the coins he’d set on the counter.

“Is he dead?” Faraday wondered.

“He is.”

“Pity. I was about to ask that man to serve me a drink.”

Sam Chisolm regarded him. He offered the bottle by its bottom, its contents sloshing.

Faraday shook his head. “The Sheriff will come calling soon. I’d just as soon be on my way. Peculiar business you’re in, Mr. Chisolm. Unsavory, I might say.”

“Not so much. There was a woman he did an awful to.” Sam Chisolm still held the bottle out in peace offering, golden light slipping through and diverting to the floor at broken angles. “She used to wear a different ribbon every day of the week. She had a dream, and it was a little dream, to have sugar cubes and nice shoes in abundance. I don’t know about you, Joshua Faraday, but there’s nothing peculiar or unsavory in my mind about taking back what didn’t belong to him.”

“That’s no law talk.”

“And yet, I’m a man of the law.”

“I know no man like you,” said Faraday, laughing. He lit up a cigarette and let the smoke curl like cloved honey in the bottom of his lungs. The winnings were still piled on the table; he cupped one arm around them and scooped them into his hat. “Law man or otherwise.”

“Could say as much about you,” Sam Chisolm noted, entirely too perceptive for Faraday’s comfort. “What’s swept you up in these parts?”

“Oh, the usual. The wind. Them dust devils.”

Voices were approaching along with the muffled tread of many boots. Faraday put his hat on his head, content that its burden would remain as he pleased it to, and ran his finger along the brim in an offhand sort of salute. “Which way you headed after?” he asked. “I’ll be sure to go the other way.”

“West. To find a vaquero.”

“Is he a bad, bad man?”

“As it happens, no. About as far as it gets from one, though tough times and circumstance have come down hard on his head.” Sam Chisolm unfolded one sheet of paper from his pocket and smoothed its creases out against the edge of the bar. “He’s going to be much needed for the woman set to find me. Matter of fact, so are you.”

“Not interested,” Faraday said immediately. “But flattered—you bet I’m flattered.”

Sam Chisolm was set to say something, but the sheriff burst through the doors like hellhounds were licking his ankles. Sam Chisolm turned to him, and Faraday slipped out the back way while he was distracted. There was always something unsettling—and irksome—about meeting someone like himself. A town was only big enough for one at a time, truly, and Faraday needed plenty of elbow room.

As if to underscore his point—this being a small, small world after all—he stepped into the blazing sun and straight into a rifle pointed at his face.

“Wild Bill!” he exclaimed, a grin splitting his face.

(Seemed like there’d be a story today, after all. Like most of his that started with a gun, it ended in a gunshot, and Faraday walked away tall and satisfied.)

 

**vi.**

 

The town smelled like horseshit, but Emma paid it no mind. She was watching the crowd in front of the saloon converge over a corpse, and then she was watching the man who was striding to his horse, the agreeable lines of his spine and hips. It gave her no pleasure to watch him, but the sight slaked some of her desperation. She simply knew him. Swoop in her stomach. Sun in her eyes. World, cloven.

“Oh no,” whispered Teddy Q, taking down his hat. He clutched it to his heart as if worried something might fall out otherwise.

“That man is our salvation, Teddy,” Emma said. “Try not to look at him like you’re heading to the noose.”

“They can be the same thing,” said Teddy Q, but something in him straightened up and his expression smoothed itself out. They rode up to the man who was more, taking their time. He was standing still as if he were waiting for them.

“Excuse me,” said Emma when they were upon him. “My name is Emma Cullen and I’m in need of a man with your qualifications.”

“Sam Chisolm,” said the man, who looked up without squinting from the sun, “duly sworn warrant officer of the circuit court in Wichita, Kansas. I’m a licensed peace officer in the Indian Territories, Arkansas, Nebraska, and seven other states. It so happens,” he said, “I’m in need of what you come bearing.”

Emma’s heart fought in her ribcage, overtaking her calm. “Is it that easy?”

“You tell me.”

“We harken from Rose Creek,” said Teddy Q, apprehensively. He kept his horse a good three feet back from them. “Five days’ ride from here. There’s a baron, see, he’s taken over the town. He’s got prospects in the hills. Been terrorizing the homesteads. Got the sheriff on his payroll and Blackstone agents swarming the land like boars. Just waitin’ to gouge us.”

“Killed our people,” Emma said. “My husband. His blood in my hands. His life floating right out of them. He’s still laying there under the mercy of the birds, on account of Bogue’s cruelty.”

“Bogue,” Sam Chisolm said, as if the syllable came from deep inside of him. He sighed a little and traced the rim of his hat. “Bartholomew Bogue. Now I should have known. Been waiting for his name to cross my paper for an age.”

“Please,” she said, and there was that shaking in her, that big awful something that filled those empty spaces Matthew left behind. She could barely speak through the swelling of her tongue, past the imperfect press of her organs against one another. “We have need of a man like you. Someone more than a man. Bigger.”

“What you need isn’t a man like me,” Sam Chisolm corrected her, pulling himself onto his horse by the saddle. He made it an impossibly graceful feat. “Bogue is a perversion of the ways. An organic blight. Against that, and his coffers and hired gunmen, you need an army of men like me.”

And it was Teddy Q—meek and mouse-quiet, born with a farmer’s hands and clumsy with his reading, still wet behind his ears in all manner of things—who said, “We intend to hire one.”

“Sir,” he added, a moment later.

Emma reached out and clung to his hand, squeezing once in her gratitude. She looked on Sam Chisolm and felt—not trepidation, but the sense each woman had when a person crossed her shadow and sent her shivering. Everything would change now. Her trials and tribulations would be fresh, and the pain that came with them the same.

“I have business with Bartholomew Bogue,” said Sam Chisolm. “And it so happens, I have some prospects for you. The first one’s about to lose his horse, though, so if it’s all the same to you, let’s ride while we talk.”

It was all the same to Emma.

 

**vii.**

 

Joshua Faraday was the man everyone wanted to be. 

His was a coaxing, sly voice, perfectly capable of convincing a bullet to hit its target and a fine woman to loosen her laces. He drank for the long day and rode into the long dark. In a card game, he always took the jackpot after a merry chase of painted royalty on paper. Ladies fell in love with him—the falling sometimes literal, to his chagrin—but had to satisfy themselves with a wild, raucous night of passion, and the pleasure of gossiping to their kin and friends what it was like to experience the world’s _greatest lover_. They said there was a girl in every town who sighed on his name. They said he was a cheat, and a scoundrel, and a liar, and a king. They said he got everything he wanted, and he usually paid for it dearly through some tomfoolery or another, but he got it all the same.

In the saloons, men drank to the idea of him—the good fortune of being him—and dreamed, whittling their hours away. “Joshua Faraday,” they liked to say, “let me tell you about that crafty son of a bitch. Have I got a story for you.”

And oh boy, did they.

Once, he’d spoiled the linen of a millwright’s daughter on the eve of her wedding, having whispered to her that her scars of labor were the finest handwriting he’d seen on flesh. And for one night, she believed as such. Of course, to avoid her furious father’s righteous rifling, Faraday had to hop out a window and scale the giant wheel churning in the river to escape the scene of the crime. His ass near caught fire from shimmying down the damn thing. Not four hours after that, he tricked a gang of outlaws out of their newly stolen banknotes in a game of cards, which he’d made up the rules to, and kept changing the rules to, in order to confuse them. In the end, Faraday had taken everything but the patches on their pants. He ate nothing but steak for two weeks and got sick and a little round from the excess.

Oh, but those were only tricks—a little fun. Once, he convinced a band of no-good robbers that surrounded his campsite to walk one by one into a pit of quicksand. _Go on_ , he said to them, armed with nothing but a quicksilver tongue, wearing naught but his long underwear. _You been workin’ hard. Sun’s been so hot. Bet you’d like a swim, that feeling of coolness as it crushes in around you. Clean and sweet as a girl’s laughter, that. Tight as a good fuck. Yeah, you like that, don’t you? Go on, after your buddy. In you go. Whoo! Take a breath now. Relax all out and just feel it._

He waited until every last bastard was encased to his shoulders before taking their hats. A man could always use some more hats.

He went from town to town on the wind fall, the cutting shear that swept along the desert and howled in the canyons. Wild Jack knew the roads. And trouble might follow him, but he always got out of it.

Faraday couldn’t get enough of his tales, truth be told. He kept traveling, kept falling into them, kept acting out higher and crazier. Every tall tale he lived through was one step closer to the story that would be his last: some final cautionary tale, or maybe an homage that resigned him to legend. There was always That Tale waiting for them at the end. And it was risky, sure, to push onward.

But Faraday aimed to be the best. The tallest. The tale to end all tales.

Course, that’s exactly how tall tales got themselves killed, which was still a glitch in Faraday’s plan that he was working on. It was a work in progress.

 

**viii.**

 

It would sure help if he’d stop losing bets to leprechauns in back alleys when he was too drunk to see straight.

Christ, his _horse_. What kind of stupid—

And then he couldn’t even barter him back! Faraday’s gifted tongue failed him for reasons that were neither readily apparent nor appreciated, and the angry Irishman apparently immune to his charms refused to budge from a figure that Faraday’s last week of winnings didn’t even come close to covering.

Jack screamed at him from the pen, which only made Faraday feel like more of a jackass.

“Yeah, real nice,” he said, hanging on the gate woefully, watching as Jack hooved at the dirt and cloves patches in vicious patterns. “What the hell kind of story is this, anyway?”

“The beginning,” said Sam Chisolm, riding up with a two-party entourage like some kind of harbinger of mornings worth bitching over.

“Lord have mercy,” Faraday said. “I ain’t done nothin’ to deserve you on my back. Well. Not this week, anyhow.”

“Not on your back,” agreed Sam Chisolm. “But maybe watchin’ it.”

Faraday looked at him. He looked at the two bedraggled folks hanging behind Sam Chisolm, their best days well behind them. The lady still had blood caked into her cuticles; the young ‘un looked ready to faint. He looked, too, at Jack biting at the wind that blew through the pen in vain, his shrill cries growing more frustrated.

“You brought trouble down on me,” he complained, already resigned.

Sam Chisolm smiled. “I heard you like trouble.”

Well, so Faraday did.

“If you’re giving him trouble,” said the Irishman, “you can have the damn horse for two bits.”

“That is _my horse_ ,” said Faraday, horrified. “And he’s worth a hell of a lot more than that!”

Sam Chisolm shrugged at his strange flock, and the young man with the nervous disposition began to dig in his pockets. He had a pistareen, as a matter of fact, and that was how Joshua Faraday was shanghaied into the fight of a lifetime, or as he would later find out, the end of one.

“Guess we’d better go see this vaquero of yours,” he said.

 

**ix.**

 

Morning broke into an isolated cabin and woke a man from his pleasant doze by the stove. He yawned, jaw cracking, and went to collect the eggs for breakfast, walking out into the dawn with bare feet and his shirtsleeves flapping. The ground felt good under him, like soft powder.

There were only two hens left, so he was surprised when he shooed the fat little beasts away from their nests. Six eggs were clustered there, freckled brown and yet warm.

Vasquez picked up an egg. He studied it, wondering.


	2. no good deed goes unpunished (the recruitment of the good samaritan and the pale rider)

**x.**

 

They rode west, which had the benefit of being both on its way to Rose Creek and the direction of Sam Chisolm’s mysterious vaquero. Faraday amused himself for a time with taking the shortcuts—skimming the plains, rocketing through crevices in the mountainscape, Jack riding hard and eager as ever, working up a lather—but then he had to circle back four times too many for his pleasure, on account of no one else being as fast and clever. The final time he circled back and swung in next to Teddy Q, the boy about whacked him in the face with a stick out of surprise.

“This is right aggravating,” said Faraday.

“That’s a word for it, Mr. Faraday,” said Emma.

He took a longer look at her: a rope of red hair, a wobble to the set of her mouth that promised her grief, when it spilled, would bury any witnesses in the vicinity. “I could go on ahead,” he tried, not for the first time. “Reckon I ought to, if we only have—what was it?”

“Three weeks before Bogue sets back on the town from Sacramento,” said Teddy Q. Emma paid neither of them any mind; she watched Sam Chisolm the way one wounded cat watched another.

“I don’t want you taking my horse too far out of sight,” said Sam Chisolm mildly.

“Excuse you,” Faraday said, offended. He wasn’t certain what offended him more: the idea that he might skip out on a promise sworn and a responsibility bought, or the idea that _Wild Jack_ , Wind Walker, belonged to any man, even a tall sort.

Sam Chisolm glanced his way. He smiled up to his eyes and took evident pity. “Close now. You hungry?”

“We’ve got some beans,” said Teddy Q, when no one else spoke up.

“That’s a fine offer,” Sam Chisolm told him. “And I’ve no doubt we’ll eat plenty of beans in the coming days. But there won’t be any hot griddles between us and Rose Creek, so if one’s on offer, we ought to take advantage.”

“A griddle?” Emma asked.

Faraday squinted into the sun as it trailed a sluggish path over their heads, leaving a smeared mirage of yellow like a broken yolk in its wake. They were running out of sand and would sink into the treeline soon, which offered some respite in its shade. “I could eat,” he finally said.

 

**xi.**

 

The cabin was a small but sturdy construction of local lumber and sawdust packed in with mud to fill gaps and nooks. Its windows were swung open to air the rooms, and a fenced-in area contained a few scrawny chickens and a handsome horse mottled white and gray, with a round firm belly. Hidden in the trees, Faraday thought a soul could make a fine home for himself in such a place if he had the means to eat. Perfect for a wanted man.

He had to admit, Sam Chisolm had one hell of a talent for finding what didn’t want to be found—be it intuition or forces of a higher calling. The sound and smell of sizzling sausage releasing fat filled the clearing, and the door to the cabin was open. Inside, a man hummed in baritone.

“Now that’s what I’m about,” said Faraday, stupidly pleased. His mouth watered and he hauled his leg over Jack, dust clouding as he hit ground. “No one cooks that much protein for a trap.”

“Are we expected?” Emma asked warily.

Sam Chisolm unmounted and offered her his arm. His eyes were serious and dark and kind. “There are some folk,” he said, “who, when you need a little something, when you need an extra hand—when you’re at the end of your rope—maybe they’ll come down your road. Maybe they’ll cross your path. There are some folk who, whatever else they may be, are also good. Inherently, unequivocally. And they will do what they can to help.”

Emma slid down from her horse in a heap of dirty skirt; for the first time, Faraday noticed one of her shoes was broken at the heel. “I don’t follow.”

“Shit,” said Faraday. “A Good Samaritan? A _vaquero_?” He reassessed his great and abiding love of sausage as it would measure against that idea. “Ain’t he a wanted man?”

“Good men can fall on hard times,” Sam Chisolm said.

“Yeah, but we’re probably gonna need more than a shingle nailed down. A Samaritan won’t be much use in a firefight. Hell, most of their stories get bundled together—they’re never Named.”

“Hard times season a man,” Sam Chisolm said, but he had no opportunity to clarify himself, if he ever intended to. The door to the cabin filled and a man whistled sharply at them, wiping his hands down with a grubby rag.

Faraday gave him one glance—then he gave him two, as a pistol jutted out from the rag and set on Teddy Q.

“You Vasquez?” Sam Chisolm called.

Vasquez cocked the safety. “What’s this to you?”

“The Samaritan is pointing a gun at us,” Faraday marveled.

“Steady there,” said Sam Chisolm, reaching slowly to his vest. He didn’t flinch at Vasquez’s slight shift of the barrel in his direction. “I’m gonna tear up a warrant. Or if you’ve got some vanity to you, maybe you’d just as soon keep it as a memento.”

Vasquez studied him, then the folded square of paper pulled from his pocket, and at last he turned a searching look across the party as a whole. He squinted at Emma’s dirt-pocked face, Teddy Q’s nervous fidgeting, and Faraday’s gape-mouthing, but mostly he squinted at Sam Chisolm as if he were trying to place him. He was barefoot; the steps complained under his weight as he descended the porch and approached. He kept his gun trained on Sam Chisolm, plucked the warrant out of his hand, and shook the paper until it unfolded.

“This is not very Samaritan-like behavior,” said Faraday.

Vasquez ignored him. He studied the warrant and made a face. “Poor likeness. _Madre de dios_ , that nose.”

“Got a business proposition for you,” Sam Chisolm said.

Vasquez seemed to think about that. Sliding the pistol back into the seat of his pants, he tipped his head at the cabin. “Breakfast?”

“Now _that_ is Samaritan-like behavior,” said Faraday. 

 

**xii.**

 

There was a storm coming that threatened to hang in the sky. It would not break. It would not be dethroned. The clouds would thicken and bridge across the expanse, leaving an early gloaming to settle over the desert, where it would remain until the swelling grew grotesque. Red Harvest could taste it on the air. He could feel it against his skin.

To the southwest, then. To the convergence.

He spoke to his people for a time and confirmed their stores were full. They would eat well for the coming weeks. They wouldn’t suffer for his travels—and he did travel, between those who spoke his words and those who didn’t, from the decedents of his mother who yet carried her jawline to their distant cousins who remained in the northeastern mountains, time slipping as assuredly as water between his fingers—and they were at peace because Red Harvest always returned to them. However long it took. However far he went, or however far they went.

Red Harvest’s path was not with the Nemene, had not been for a very long time. But he’d come home to show the children where the snakes hid, and how to strip the deer, and the composition of paints, and the mapping of the stars. Red Harvest would ensure their supplies fattened. It was said he could fell four deer with the same arrow, and that he learned to walk without a whisper. These stories were true. It was said he bred the first of the painted horses from their stock by coating his palms in clay and pressing prints into their hides, and so fine was the work, the spring colt took on its likeness. This story was also true. He had chased the demon-harboring snake across the death march until it grew too tired and dried up in the sun. He had fought in the long wars with many faces, wearing ten times as many as he fought.

But that had been—a long time ago. When Red Harvest was young. His face hadn’t changed for many years, but the world showed his age, weathered and cracked through.

The storm that was coming would bring further change. That much Red Harvest knew. It was the arrangement of things: the bow drawn taut would need to release and could not be taken back. He took few supplies, preferring to find what he needed on the journey. The daughter of his nephew’s daughter’s son pulled on his wrist before he left, and he bent to give her a treat, and he touched her jawline. His mother’s jawline.

“Where will you go?” she asked him, solemn, grubby-cheeked.

Red Harvest said, “In a circle,” because it was and had always remained true.

 

**xiii.**

 

They had further company waiting in the cabin.

“This is Elijah,” said Vasquez, beelining for the stove. The sausage was just beginning to blacken, and there was a small clay bowl of hen’s eggs beside it and what appeared to be a paste of corn flour and meal. “Elijah built this homestead some seven months ago. He has had the kindness to let me stay a while.”

Elijah lifted a hand in greeting, his grin gap-toothed. He was bundled in a thin cot flush against the wall, bandages wound tight around his neck. There was another bundle of blankets set at the foot of the cot. “Don’t listen to him,” he said hoarsely. “I’d be dead if it weren’t for his care.”

“He was already shot if that’s what you’re wondering,” said Vasquez. He began to crack the eggs on the griddle, forking the oozing trails into obedient shapes. “I won’t claim that poor handiwork.”

“You let a wanted vaquero sleep at your feet for a whole month,” Faraday said, because it seemed like the kind of stupidity that warranted repetition. On the other hand, he couldn’t argue with the results, seeing as the man was alive and on the mend.

“He doesn’t snore much,” said Elijah, seriously.

“Well, that’s fine then.”

“If I’m not mistaken,” said Vasquez, gesturing, “that’s Sam Chisolm.”

“ _The_ Sam Chisolm?” Elijah straightened in his bed and pawed his beard into some semblance of order. “And the rest of you?”

“My associates on this venture,” said Sam Chisolm. “Mrs. Emma Cullen, our patron. This young man is Teddy Q.”

“Pleasure,” said Emma, though she clearly had not a touch of it.

“And I’m Joshua Faraday,” Faraday said, lifting his chin and grinning loose and rakish. He normally saved it for the ladies, but there was breakfast on the line, and he wanted two eggs but only counted six on the griddle. That, and he loved to see ‘em react to his name.

“Nice to meet you,” Elijah said, polite but with no recognition.

Faraday looked at Vasquez.

Vasquez didn’t pay him any mind, though. He gave Emma a smile instead. “You’re tired, _señora_. We don’t have many chairs, but please, sit.” He gestured for Elijah to make room, and he did, scooting to the corner of his cot and leaving a few feet of undisturbed space. Emma sat slowly, still ever watchful as if she expected trouble to follow her down.

“Christ,” said Faraday. “I know I can’t compare to Sam Chisolm, but that’s a kick to the balls. _The_ Joshua Faraday? Anybody?”

Vasquez laughed at him, a little meanly.

“You are one fucked-up Good Samaritan,” Faraday said cross-like, and then, “Jesus, you realize those eggs are already dead?”

 

**xiv.**

 

There were only three plates, but Vasquez scooped breakfast out into a frying pan and the clay bowl for Faraday and Elijah, and into a tin mug for himself, which he stirred vigorously with a knife. The pickings were good. The sausage burst hot in Faraday’s mouth and although he wouldn’t say as much, the eggs split in perfect consistency under his spoon. He ate and listened to the bargaining and got all sour when he realized it was going a heckuva lot smoother than it had for himself, what with his horse being held hostage and all.

It went like this:

“You a bounty hunter?” Elijah asked. His food had been cut into small pieces for him by Vasquez, who’d ignored Faraday’s snort of disbelief.

Sam Chisolm shook his head. “Duly sworn warrant officer.”

“Because I don’t want no trouble here. Nothin’ against you, sir, but this man done me a good turn.”

“I believe that. I do. But there’s a five-hundred-dollar reward for his capture. A dead ranger by his hand.”

“Maybe he had it coming,” said Vasquez.

(And wasn’t that just more insanity on top of the pile. Faraday eyed him over the cast iron frying pan, which was as heavy a plate as he’d ever held but had the benefit of a good coating of seasoning to add to his meal. He was still agog. The idea of any kind of helpful goody-goody spirit always made Faraday roll his eyes, but the idea of one murdering a man in cold blood was even more ridiculous. Disquieting, too. _Unnatural_ might come to mind.)

“Doesn’t matter to me either way,” Sam Chisolm said, “but if it’s of import to you, why yes, I reckon he did.”

Vasquez blinked slowly at him. He didn’t have much to say to that, but Faraday was quick to notice that he stopped keeping one hand free to grab for the gun. Cupping his breakfast, he set on it with single-minded determination.

“If you’re not here for the reward…” Elijah said.

“Got a business proposition.”

“Don’ kill people fer money,” Vasquez said, mouth full.

“Somehow that’s worse,” said Faraday.

“It’s my business,” said Emma. “And there’s money in it for you, but if you are what Mr. Chisolm said, you’ll not meet anyone more in need of assistance.”

Vasquez regarded her for a long while over his cup. Nothing went soft in his face, but maybe something in his eyes changed. “And after our business is concluded?”

“There’ll still be a lot of men after your hide,” said Sam Chisolm. “Some of ‘em looking for blood, some of ‘em favors.”

He laughed. “And that should give me comfort?”

“Should. I won’t be one of ‘em.”

“As a note of interest,” said Faraday, “I would still like to know what you _do_ kill people for.”

Biting into his sausage, Vasquez gave him a long look from head to toes, sizing him up. He didn’t raise to the bait, though. “You’re crazy, my friends,” he said, “but if Elijah is ready to stand on his own feet, I can’t in good conscious say no.”

(Too late, Faraday realized Sam Chisolm played dirty pool and there were other things to hold hostage than horses. But it would be a few days more before he thought as much, and by then, they were men committed to the grave walk.)

 

**xv.**

 

It didn’t take long for Vasquez to gather what few things he had—they fit neatly into a dirty pack at ready for running—and it turned out the bastard had two guns instead of one. He spoke a few quiet words with Elijah, clasped his arm, and parted with little fanfare. He did not, despite taking care of the man some weeks, seem to miss him something horrible. Faraday wondered if that was perhaps the way it was for the Smarties. Hard to get attached when you were always on the move.

“Where now?” Teddy Q asked after they set off. It appeared that some breakfast gave the kid a taste of courage. That or it was Vasquez, who laughed uproariously at the least little godawful joke.

Sam Chisolm clicked his tongue. “Twenty miles east from here. Volcano Springs. Supply station, or what passes for one in these parts. More canvas than wood.”

“That,” Faraday announced, “is back the way we came.”

“It is. It’s our good fortune we have a man in our party who can ride on the canyon’s calls, then, isn’t it. He could travel ahead, pick up an old friend, and meet us as we head northwest.”

“You could have said _earlier_.”

“And have you miss those eggs?” 

“Flattery,” said Vasquez, sounding pleased.

“Had to make sure you wouldn’t steal my horse,” Sam Chisolm told Faraday. 

Faraday gave him the stink eye. “Of the people here, I am _least_ likely to be a horse thief.”

Vasquez made an offended noise at that, but it dissolved into more laughter. He had very—teeth. A lot of ‘em. It was no wonder he had a bad case of crow’s feet around his eyes, what with all his guffawing.

“You’re lookin’ for a Cajun, name of Robicheaux.”

Faraday lost all interest in Vasquez. He stared at Sam Chisolm, apparent madman. “Goodnight Robicheaux? _The_ Angel of Death? Blood-Breath-Bone Rattler? The Coming Night? _A Pale Horse_?”

“That’d be him. Fella with the neatest goatee you’ll see in the West,” said Sam Chisolm. “Be nice and he’ll buy you a drink. You pick him and his ilk up, meet us outside of Junction City in two days. If you take the Big Fork, we oughta meet in a timely way.” He waved his hand. “If I ain’t there, it means I’m dead and you can keep my horse.”

“I am _far_ more likely to die on this venture,” Faraday pointed out. “You sure aren’t pulling your punches with this Bogue character.”

Emma said, as if her voice was a dark welling formless thing from the bottom of her body, “I have only some recollection of Goodnight Robicheaux. But if you have the means to bring such a man down on Bogue’s head, I will give you more than the everything that’s been promised to you.”

And well, Faraday couldn’t rightly say no after that.

 

**xvi.**

 

They were an odd collection of bedfellows, but Vasquez had ridden with odder. After Faraday rode east at a speed that left the rest of the party breathless—and even Vasquez, no stranger to the windfallen ways a man could traverse, whistled after him—they began to leisurely head northwest. Being on the road again settled Vasquez. In truth, he rarely felt comfortable lingering in any one place. He was made for wandering, not for chicken coops.

He made amiable conversation with Teddy Q a while, but in time his horse fell into the same lazy stride as their benefactor. She was a woman hard to look on, because she obviously thirsted for more than water, subsisted on sharp things instead of soft. Vasquez had known such people before. They were difficult to help. So often it was a patch job that only masked the underlying rot for the season.

“It’s a good woman to overlook the nature of her companions,” he said with some cheer. “Or a desperate one. Either way, my fortune.”

Emma side-eyed him. “Is it self-disparaging or a comment on the party as a whole?”

“Eh, both.”

“I don’t have the luxury of a high horse,” she said. “Bogue must be dealt with. Sometimes a nightmare can only be displaced by a second, worser nightmare. If I’ll have no sleep either way, I may as well have my satisfaction.”

Vasquez considered that as he pulled his cigarillos from his jacket. He offered her one and received, for the first time, something approaching a smile. “I don’t partake,” she said.

“I’m not in the business of nightmares,” he said after a while, sucking in the acrid smoke and letting it tendril out of the corners of his mouth. “I can shoot—very well! But I’m much better at rebuilding, busy work. Maybe there’ll be a need for that, too?”

She exhaled all at once as if surprised by the thought of what waited for them _after_. “Could be,” she said. “Yes. Yes, we have a need for that.”

This time when he offered Emma a cigarillo, she took it. She didn’t accept a match, but instead rolled the length of the cigarillo between her fingers and at last tucked it away in her pack. The pallor in her cheeks diminished and when she pressed her hands to them, she inhaled as if she were pulling the latent sweet smoky scent into her lungs. In the sun, she had freckles. She was younger than the weight of her heartache.

“Thank you,” she said.

Riding ahead of them, Sam Chisolm tilted his head slightly. He said nothing, but the slope of his shoulders eased. 

 

**xvii.**

 

Billy Rocks was paying more attention to the scuff on his boot than the huffing man accusing him of cheating. That was nothing new—men had been making that noise about Billy as long as he’d been here. They’d make it to his face, to his back, to his corpse someday. “The world of the white man is about two things,” Goodnight liked to say. “Moaning about how everyone ignores his predicaments and ignoring the predicaments of others. That is what we call a self-prophesy.”

But the scuff now—these boots were near new and he had the inkling that it was Goodnight’s fault. He’d been stumbling drunk last night, and it would be just his way to step on Billy’s new boot and pretend the offense never occurred in the first place.

“You all saw for yourselves! I didn’t lose to _that_.”

Billy squinted up at the sun. Was he supposed to go around with the hat and collect his winnings? Or wait until the man was done spitting at the dirt?

“Come on now, Arcade,” Eddy said with a weariness that Billy found agreeable. There were many reasons he only put himself in Eddy’s ring these last few weeks: the man was fair, drew a solid crowd, and only ever called Billy by his name. “He won plainly. Don’t be sore.”

“We all saw differently,” said Arcade. He puffed up, blood pulsing in his face and making it as shiny as a penny. “Why don’t we do it for real this time?”

“Come on, none of that. Back off.”

“No, no, double down. Y’hear?” he hollered, turning to the crowd. “We’ll do it for real! Real guns, real consequences.” He spat again, giving Billy the sort of look that just made Billy feel tired anymore. “You game, you scum-sucking runt of a man?”

“Game,” said Billy with a shrug.

“It’s your funeral, Arcade,” Eddy said, even more wearily than before. He was a kindred spirit, Billy decided.

Across the way, silhouette visible at the second-floor window, Goodnight was watching them. Billy could tell from the slump of his shadow that he was intent—probably fretting. Goody was a _fretter_. But even that wouldn’t get him out here with a crowd of people who knew his name and face. Not safe, he’d say. He didn’t trust himself with crowds. One on one, sure. Even two on two. In the corner of a saloon until the people grew too rowdy, maybe. If he were in the mood. If the death count was low enough in the recent weeks.

Billy and Goodnight had a language of a different sort, these days. He set his feet, lifted his chin, and reassured Goodnight he’d be back shortly with prize money to spare. Then they’d drink again, and Billy would put his boots up somewhere safe.

“The hell,” said Arcade, as Billy sheathed his guns and brought out the knives.

Not that he _needed_ them, but that was Goodnight’s rule. In a firefight, Billy was to step back from his pride and rely on what he was best at. It was a rule that Billy conceded to because it had some sense to it and he understood Goodnight’s fear.

All they had was each other. Little to lose and everything at the same time.

“Billy?” Eddy asked.

Billy gave him a short nod and prepared himself.

“All right then,” said Eddy. “On my gun.”

The bullet missed him by a hairsbreadth. But Billy’s blade found its mark without fail and he collected his winnings from the willing. There was a new face in the parade of others, which Billy had never seen. When Billy held out the hat silently—they’d either drop money into it or not, but they did more often than not with Eddy’s censure behind him—the man shrugged and gave him a bit of nothing much.

“Was told you’re who I need to talk to about finding Goodnight Robicheaux,” he said.

“You sure?” Billy asked dryly.

“Uh, you kind of stick out.”

Billy eyed him. “You can buy the alcohol,” he decided, because that was the second rule Goodnight had—in a life that gave you little, it was only right to ask more of it at every opportunity.

 

**xviii.**

 

“My lan’s,” marveled Goodnight Robicheaux, as Faraday lived and breathed (and hopefully kept doing). “Sam Chisolm. Duly sworn warrant officer from Wichita, Kansas and seven other states. Skin shifter, iron-clad honor, always gets his prey. Tall as tall tales get. Do we have the same man?”

“I reckon so,” said Faraday, taking a swig from his liquor. It burned all the way down—quality shit because hell if he’d buy the Angel of Death pig swill. Take no chances and all that.

“Well,” Goodnight said, pleased.

The room Goodnight and his man were staying in was pretty opulent by Faraday’s standards: ottomans upholstered in stretched-soft calf hide, a mirror, a richly embroidered bedspread, brass studs stamped across the window sash. There was, he noted, one bed. Not that he was judging. Okay, he was judging, but mostly it was specific to the kind of balls a man would have to have to sleep toe to toe with the Heart Stopper. Maybe there was another room. _Had_ to be.

“Can’t say I’ve seen him since the war,” Goodnight was saying, swirling his glass of whiskey like it was worth even more than Faraday paid for it. “Hmm, this is the good stuff, son. You chose nicely.”

“Yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. Billy, you like it?”

Slumped against the ottoman on the floor, his hair falling into his eyes, Billy hummed and waved his hand. 

“He likes it,” Goodnight said, grinning at Faraday. He did, in fact, have the neatest goatee that Faraday had ever seen in his damned life.

“How’d y’all meet? Saw your man here. He’s got unusual talents.”

Goodnight chuckled. “I was serving a warrant on this good man for the Northern Pacific Railroad, as it happens. Back when I was doing that sort of work.”

“Warrant for what?” Faraday eyeballed him. “Sticking a man with a hairpin?”

Billy looked at him, unreadable. He drank deeply from his glass while Faraday squirmed. Said, “ _Funny_.”

Faraday laughed nervously and finished his glass off. He was thinking again about the man in the corral, how he’d thumped down and was just dead—how much force would be required behind a thrown knife of that size to reach to his pulpy yellow heart.

“You think that’s something, you should’ve seen him when we first met,” said Goodnight. “Where was it, Billy—Dallas? Some old redneck saloon in Texas, and all these good ol’ boys who didn’t want to serve his kind—I think it was Dallas or near enough to it. So this petite son of a bitch, he only asked for a drink twice before he took on the whole room bare-knuckled, least until he found himself a cheese knife. Then it got real exciting.” He leaned forward, all lit up. “I watched in sheer _awe_ and I said to myself, now, this is not a man to arrest. This is a man who has earned his drink. So I bought him one, and I’ve been buying them ever since.”

“Hah,” said Billy.

Faraday nodded because the alternative would come across as an insult. This was Goodnight Robicheaux; he probably liked that kind of stubborn crazy cocktail of violence. Or at least—and that’s when Faraday thought of something else and twisted again to look at Billy on the floor.

“Huh. So you’re…?”

“Good with knives,” said Billy.

“Billy’s gotten some notoriety from his skills,” Goodnight clarified. “I’m afraid word doesn’t travel as far as it ought, however, and few care to attach a name to the deeds. So, it’s a work in progress of sorts.”

“It’s not a work of anything,” said Billy. “I’m not Named. I don’t collect stories.”

Faraday frowned. “Even with a show like the one I just saw?”

“No one likes to talk about how quickly I can kill a white man in an alley fight,” said Billy. 

Faraday considered that, then tipped his glass in acknowledgement. 

“We make equal shares for those alley fights. It’s not a bad way to live—for man and legend alike.” Goodnight took the bottle and topped off Faraday in a show of good manners before seeing to Billy and himself. “An exchange of services, if you will.”

“Goody helps me navigate prejudice and finds locations to hole up in and make coin,” Billy told Faraday. “I keep him on the level. More or less.”

“I am a man in great need of leveling,” agreed Goodnight.

Hooking his ankles together, Faraday leaned back and chewed at the rim of his glass. “S’pose we could have you both,” he said, a little doubtful. “Sam Chisolm didn’t specifically name your friend here, but he mentioned I oughta bring your ilk, and that seems near enough square.” 

“You call him that?” Goodnight asked, amused. “Sam Chisolm, his whole name, all the time?”

Faraday sputtered at him. Billy hid a smile in the fall of his hair, though not near quick enough. It was something of a relief to be honest, because Faraday was starting to worry that the man was without any emotions whatsoever. Even if they were at Faraday’s expense.

“Up for a change of pace, Billy?” Goodnight asked.

Billy was still smiling a little. He shrugged. “Will you be okay?”

That was a strange question, but Goodnight didn’t seem to think so. He gave Billy the kind of look that made Faraday feel stupid—like maybe he wanted to do something, but wouldn’t—like maybe he took pleasure in the question, but didn’t. “Now I can’t fault you for asking,” he said with a gentleness that made Faraday even more uncomfortable as its witness. “But Sam Chisolm is my friend, and if he needs me, no other course of action is acceptable.”

Billy took the rest of the bottle for himself.


	3. we build fires because it’s the only way to share the dark (the lonely tale of jack horne and a red harvest approaches)

**xix.**

 

Emma could not deny that riding with these men was a comfort, however pale in comparison to the fury that ate away at her insides like she was a composite of kindling and paper. There was yet work to be done, but Emma had a plan, she had the beginnings of an army, and being in their larger-than-life presence made her feel as if she, too, was a part of something grander. She had no interest in being grand, of course, but she would not begrudge the strength that came from feeling, seeming, _being_ t-a-l-l-e-r.

Bogue waited on them. She would see him dead for what he’d taken from her.

Although Vasquez was a surprisingly amiable companion, she preferred to ride in tandem with Sam Chisolm. They made for strange associates: the grubby homesteader widow and this neatly groomed, thoughtful figure of impossibilities. But Emma couldn’t deny that his quiet readiness was a boon to her mind, which oftentimes seemed so fractured and sensitive that the smallest noise would rend it further. While riding, she daydreamed about Matthew. She remembered his hands that never quite kept their calluses. She remembered hooking his curls on her fingers and pulling. She remembered his hum in front of the stove, a tenor that filled up the empty spaces around them and settled in pots and pans and eaves. Matthew filled their home simply because he’d had so much to give.

Emma was not a giver. She was exactly as much as she weighed—as much as her muscles, as much as her spine, as much as her heartsoreness. She was the one to work the land long into the night until Matthew begged her to come inside from the encroaching dark. When the well went dry, it was Emma who found the mud-pocked bubbles of groundwater springing again from the desert. Neither blood nor pus brought her to flinch; she wept for Matthew, but not the mess left of him.

In many ways, she thought that Sam Chisolm might understand her. Some things just needed to be done. Some days, it was enough to be exactly as much as one weighed.

“Should I tell you a story,” Sam Chisolm said as their horses trekked across the hard terrain, slow and steady. 

Emma, at his side, gave him her attention. “I didn’t imagine you had stories that weren’t your own,” was all she said.

“Others don’t. I don’t deny some vanity—although it hasn’t got much to do with my stories—but I consider it pigheaded to believe there’s nothing to learn from other cautionary tales and the like. And I don’t find much wonder in my own, and I believe we all need some of that. Take it for what you will.”

“I could sorely use some wonder,” she said.

Trailing behind them, Vasquez was attempting to teach Teddy Q about the fine art of finding lost cattle. There was a little wonder in that itself.

Sam Chisolm cocked his head like he was listening in, too, and smiled. Maybe he was. “Man comes to the paradise after a long life of doing the right thing. He’s weary and he’s lonely. Most of his years were spent at the forefront of one battle or another. Not a stitch of peace. Not a lick.”

“Didn’t he have anyone? At all?” She ached so profoundly. Never did she imagine it was possible to ache so deeply, as if splintered in the belly.

(The low hum at the stove, the way he’d spent a good chunk of their savings on a block of oak from the carpenter. _I’ll learn to carve_ , he’d said with stupid satisfaction. _It’s a good size for a cradle, isn’t it?_ It wasn’t—too small, too mealy.)

“Sure, a few kinfolk. But none had his speed or stamina. The longer he was at battle, the further away everything else fell, too exhausted to keep pace at his side. But this man was at peace. He’d done everything he could and that was all he’d ever asked of himself.”

“Paradise must have been quite the reward,” Emma said.

“Man comes to paradise,” said Sam Chisolm, as if he were coming to the realization as he spoke, “and there are no more battles to fight. No wrongs to right. The Lord has taken all under his wing and they drink of his light, eat of his blood. The man looks on all of this and feels sick. I will starve, he says. At the tranquility: I will sully it.”

“No rest for the weary?” guessed Emma. She did not find warning or wonder in this story, but it settled along her teeth like a film of milk.

Sam Chisolm touched her arm. As he did, the sky darkened around them as if the sun had suddenly dipped into ether, and all sound flattened to the final whistle of air that had left Matthew’s lungs: wet, faulty, failing. Although he could be contained in a saddle, her companion was at once the largest living creature Emma had ever met. He was dawn and dusk alike, the candled egg and the promise of knowing. Her hands shook and her tongue felt swallowed. He was _inside_ her, reaching for the world. He was the rush of sensation in a limb long asleep, waking her with the prickling of needles.

“We are hard people,” he said. “But learn to be kind to yourself, Emma Cullen. Go long enough without and you’ll lose the ability for it, and then the taste for it, too.”

 

**xx.**

 

It took scant hours for Wild Jack to gallop into Volcano Springs, but the ride back with Goodnight and Billy was four times as long. Faraday amused himself well enough—Goodnight was a charming entertainer and a man who loved to recite a good tall tale or two—typically about Billy or a stranger on the road with _peculiar_ talents—but it was nevertheless a relief to have Junction City in his sights. It didn’t take long to find the second half of his party; the smoke from their campfire rose as a beacon into a blue, blue sky.

“Punctual as ever,” Goodnight said fondly.

“Better be lunch waiting,” said Faraday.

He wasn’t sure what he expected from the meeting of _the_ Sam Chisolm and _the_ Goodnight Robicheaux. Maybe world’s ending. Maybe a clap of lightning to strike ‘em down where they stood. Faraday kept a good distance out of a healthy respect for spontaneous calamity, but he shouldn’t have bothered. Goodnight dismounted and opened his arms and Sam Chisolm, living legend, walked right into them.

“Goodnight Robicheaux,” he said—and so that was how it sounded when he loved something.

“Sam Chisolm,” Goodnight said, shaking him by the shoulders. “Running straight into the coming storm. I see nothing’s changed.”

“No reason to be scared of a little rain,” Sam Chisolm said, grinning fit to burst. “Promise you won’t melt.”

“Oh, if you _promise_.”

“What we lose in the fire, we can reshape from cold ash and clay,” he said. Damned if it didn’t give Faraday the shivers, though, the way he said it.

“Isn’t that the truth,” said Goodnight, softer-like. He looked on Sam Chisolm a while and then untangled from him. “Sam, I want you to meet Billy Rocks. He’s my bit of kindness, if you like.”

Billy looked like he was thinking about nodding eventually.

“Yeah, you’re getting two for the work of one,” Faraday added, partly to get control of his own damned errand and partly to shake the jitters come over him. “Don’t suppose this makes up for my debt?”

“Still my horse,” said Sam Chisolm.

Christ, didn’t it figure. Faraday would’ve been disgruntled, but he noticed that Vasquez was poking around in the frying pan, meaning that there remained food enough to poke at. He gave Jack a good rubdown and swung down, intent on procuring his share. Couldn’t be sausage—but beans, surely, and maybe some of that salted pork he saw Vasquez spiriting away in his pack.

Goodnight was introducing himself to Emma, which was—okay, that would’ve been mighty interesting if Faraday wasn’t swept up in his current mission. That Goodnight had some lines. Some of ‘em, Faraday might even borrow. Not that he needed lines.

Vasquez looked up from where he was crouched beside the fire as Faraday approached. “Thought you’d be here faster, _güero_. You almost missed your chance at a meal.”

“What the hell,” said Faraday. “I’m _early_.”

“If you say so. They worth the effort?” Vasquez tipped his chin at Goodnight and Billy. He also began scraping some of the beans and—oh Mother Mary, there was some meat in there, too—into a tin cup, which tempered some of Faraday’s ire.

“That Billy is pretty nifty with them pigstickers,” he allowed, taking the cup and digging straight in. “And you know what they say about Goodnight Robicheaux.”

Vasquez gave him a look like he wasn’t sure whether Faraday was being serious. The sun had taken to his skin, and Faraday found he didn’t dislike it.

“They always say things,” Vasquez said. “But until I see any of you at work with my own eyes, I’ll assume the worst.”

Faraday finished his beans and dropped the cup in Vasquez’s lap, ignoring his sputter and protest. “You might have some smart to you, after all.”

Vasquez swore at him. Faraday didn’t speak a damn word of the language, but he was sure it was _filthy_.

 

**xxi.**

 

With their party a sight larger, Sam dared to take trails he would normally avoid. Not out of a fear of danger, but because he did dislike to be inconvenienced. He’d just as soon make it to Rose Creek without being pulled into further fanciful adventures, and being what he was, that was an actual possibility. But there was strength in numbers and a lower probability of being hooked into a tale while in a group, and it was hard enough finding Jack Horne’s lodgings on the mountainside without taking routes off the beaten path. _Where the sun bends to meet the mountain_ , the stories had said. _South of the grizzly clan, a hands width away from the wildflower meadows and a spring of fat fish. Where the first tree fell in the West. In the biggest swell of moonlight but hidden from the stars._

The stories weren’t doing Sam a whole lot of good. But Sam always got his man, so he trusted where his knees directed his horse.

“We’re an unlikely army, aren’t we?” Goodnight queried, because he did so love to talk. “Me a gray, Chisolm a blue—once upon another time at least. Billy Rocks of the East with his devilish daggers as fast as any bullet—”

“Stop that,” said Billy.

“A drunk Irishman,” Goodnight continued, ignoring him. “A Texican, a lady of some grit, and a man with an erroneous Q. What does the Q stand for, dear boy?”

“Quint, sir,” said Teddy Q.

“Erroneous,” confirmed Goodnight with a sigh.

“You are one to talk,” said Vasquez. “ _Texican_. I’ve never met one, _cabrón_ , and neither have you.”

Goodnight picked at that like a scab; he was that way and always had been as long as Sam had known him. “Tell that to my granddaddy,” he said. “He died at the Alamo. Another gray, just like me, only he didn’t have my notoriety. Suffered for it. Died an awful way. Mauled by a horde of teeming—”

“By my grandfather, maybe,” said Vasquez, mildly. It might’ve been a threat from any other man, but Sam detected nothing beyond good humor and the vestiges of something else. A low-lying sort of undercurrent, as if his words hummed with the energy of starlight. “Yes, I think I remember that in my blood. Toluca Battalion. The torn hem of my grandmother’s skirt knotted around his throat to give him courage. Gray marked them the same color as a corpse, eh? Made it easy. But after, it wasn’t easy. It never is.”

Goodnight paled and drifted from him. “The devil’s in him,” he said.

Vasquez laughed at him. “I’m sure your grandfather thought the same of mine!”

“How’d you find the only defective, murderous Good Samaritan in the West?” Faraday asked Sam, sounding pained.

“Did you say he’s a _Samaritan_?” Goodnight demanded.

“Now, you were talkin’ awfully mean at him,” said Teddy Q. “Can’t blame a dog for biting when it’s kicked.”

“I think you are trying to help,” Vasquez told him, “but the next person to call me anything besides my name will have reason to regret it.”

“I like you,” Billy told him.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Goodnight.

Sam chuckled at the lot of them. They were ragged around the edges, to be sure, but also coalescing before his very eyes, becoming what he’d needed of them. Dark days were ahead. He couldn’t guess what they might become under a united goal. It was a gamble in every meaning of the word.

He could see the shape of it, though. Formless, changeable—but rising as mountains do to blot out the moon.

 

**xxii.**

 

He came on the Colorado River and was dashed into the mountain, the first pioneer to leave his signature on its belly. 

The mountain was tall and beautiful in the golden morning, and he felt a sense of peace frame itself over his bones as he gazed up at her sweet face. “If that isn’t a sign,” he said, “there are no stars to navigate by and no roads to take us. I am entirely lost.”

His homestead was built on unforgiving ground with thick planks of fir and saplings young enough yet to bend and twist. He sliced rock as if it were creamed butter using a hatchet sharpened to the width of a grass blade, measuring the slabs so that each interlocked with another until a cozy oven took shape in his hearth. The roof was patched with moss and blue river clay, and it was a cool little house in the summer and a warm little house in the winter. The land provided—the rivers, the forest, the sands, the soil, the hard bitter roots, the deer and rabbit and rock dove—and he gave his thanks fervently.

Then other men came, and his simple life of minor miracles altered its course.

The lumberjacks took to the trees and built their sawmills. They came into the mountain with lunch pails and long saws, and for a while he found some work with them, because what man didn’t want for kind company and good companions? But there was better money in furs, so he learned how to creep up close to an animal and hear its heart falter, how to stretch and dry the skins. That was when the stories began—they said, he eats thirty griddlecakes every morning and can pick up a river and move it from its path—they said, he stomps his foot and badgers jump out of their hidey holes—they said, he fought the Grizzled Briar, largest of the bears in Nothook Valley, and still carries his skin, which he can wear over his shoulders to keep warm through the harshest snowfall—they said, he is more than a man. He is more.

Despite the strangeness of being _more_ , he had some peace. He had a wife: small and dark like the earth she cultivated, with a squashed nose but the softest smile. He had a daughter: some cut of beauty, scarcely believable, who clasped his cheeks and sang his words back to him. He had God, who needed no pages to reach him.

Then there were the wars.

And with them was the dying, far from battle. He’d not fight with his strength—now well past being able to rip rock from its foundation—but war found him regardless. It was not the war of battlefields and armies and ambush, but the sheer violence of living. Death invites other forms of death, arm in arm. Infection took his child. His wife, he found as a desecrated grave: ripped into and discarded.

He had a hatchet. It could slice rocks as if they were creamed butter, and it took the meat off bone as cleanly as that, too. He found new work. Someone was paying.

Took no pride in it. Not in the work and not in the stories that continued to grow, twisting from their original roots onto grim, stranger courses. He spent two years alone with the mountain and his speech became garbled, a bellow that could cut through the trees. He could pull down the sun if he desired sleep to come sooner. But also, he could hulk through the skirmishes that passed too close to his territory and amass hundreds of skin-caps, leaving on the morning mists with a sack dripping a black dashed line across the limestone. It didn’t matter who the skin belonged to; sometimes it was braided and sometimes it had muttonchops dangling from either end.

He would, in time, question whether the stories were only those—only _stories_. Surely he could not put away the sun. Surely he had not bathed his hands in so much blood. Surely the only tales that mattered were His sage and blessed words. But he could not be certain—his memories dampened like paper dipped into a brook—and no matter how he isolated himself, the stories continued to seek him out.

Jack Horne had gone mad a long time ago. He’d been drawn by a divine hand to this place, but it held no peace for him. He was as lost as he’d been when he started.

 

**xxiii.**

 

The little trading post was in a sad state of disrepair, and something in Vasquez was moved to inch his way in and do something about that. He silenced the instinct, though; it had no place in his present. Even if there were the time, he couldn’t imagine that the legend who supposedly did his business there would appreciate the trespass. Moreover, Vasquez knew even hinting at the desire would give Faraday more ammunition than he deserved—he’d spent the last few hours doggedly riding flank to flank with Vasquez’s horse, poking fun at him, his circumstances, and whatever else seemed to catch his eye.

“Don’t suppose he’ll offer us breakfast, too,” said Faraday, eyeing the dilapidated ruins. “Reckon he brings in elk? Rabbit?”

“You already had breakfast,” Vasquez reminded him. He was not taking insult that Faraday might prefer another’s cooking. That would be stupid.

(He was just a very stupid man sometimes, despite himself.)

“Suppose we’ll have to wait a spell,” said Sam Chisolm, looking down at a sliver of a creek idling through the grasses. He dismounted and led his horse to water. “Go on, won’t be long now. All of you.”

“Who are we waiting for?” Emma asked. She ought to have been Mrs. Cullen, but she’d introduced herself a second time to the group as a whole with only her Christian name, and Vasquez thought she might not want to hear the other.

“Man by the name of Jack Horne.”

“Christ,” said Faraday, “how many legends are you plannin’ on roping into this venture?”

Vasquez didn’t recognize the name, although names weren’t the sort of things that caught his attention. He slid from the saddle and checked his bag to see how much feed was left. If he ran low, he wasn’t certain when he could safely acquire more. His horse—a beauty who had followed him along the road until they were fast friends a few years back—nudged his hat with her nose.

“Just the one more,” Sam Chisolm assured them. He paused and added, “Maybe two. Never predict where the wind goes or you’ll wind up face down.”

“I have some reservations about the wisdom of recruiting a gentleman wanted by both the Crow and the Army,” said Goodnight. “The price they’re willing to pay for proof of death may be worth more than dear ol’ Rose Creek has promised us.”

“It isn’t,” Emma said.

Vasquez offered her a hand down and she took it. She had no smile for him—a pity—but she squeezed his arms before untangling. “No one will be turning in a wanted man for bounty,” he said mildly. “Least of all me.”

Faraday tutted at him. “You’re small potatoes.”

“You’re an ass,” Vasquez told him in complete sincerity.

“I am at least ten percent ass,” Faraday agreed.

Vasquez craned his neck back to take in the sky. Night would fall lonely and black across their backs soon; the fiery orange was already sinking into the brambles and treetops. He listened but heard nothing in their vicinity. “It doesn’t seem like anyone’s been here for a long time.”

“Doesn’t it?” asked Sam Chisolm. The porch groaned under him—an immense weight, and unfathomable pressure, a _giving_ —and the opening swallowed him in shadow. He looked back, directly at Vasquez. The sensation was akin to prickling that burst across Vasquez’s shoulders and down his spine.

Uncertain but unwilling to ignore the call, he joined him. He ducked past the strange lawman and entered the small space that smelled of dried skins and musty fur, even now in its poor fortunes. Someone had hung tin cans empty of goods across the wall. There was a place for a fire, but it was greasy and scarred. Vasquez knelt down in front of the hearth and touched the stone with a thoughtful noise.

“Good?”

“Good,” Vasquez said, surprised. He rooted in the dead and dried scrap strewn across the floor and began to build the kindling. Beside him, Sam Chisolm stayed at ready, alert, gaze pinned at the encroaching gloaming and the corners of the post that were no longer visible to the naked eye. 

An angry clicking beetle fell out into Vasquez’s lap—he cursed and flicked it far—but in five minute’s time, a fire crackled merrily enough in the small space. It illuminated the walls and the nooks and the strange markings carved into the ceiling, but Sam Chisolm did not relax, and Vasquez began to realize that no one had followed them into the trading post. They were alone, and the world seemed shut out. The flames were red and then paled to violet-blue: smoke long spent from the earth.

“Now that is a nice fire,” creaked a Voice.

 

**xxiv.**

 

They all watched in a semicircle, curled around the trading post as if in church, maybe, or bearing witness. Though what they were meant to witness, Emma wasn’t certain. She couldn’t see much beyond the opening—only Sam, stood up like a tin soldier, and Vasquez, leaning forward into a small fire he’d set with his head bowed close. Though they were only a word away, she felt it as more than a separation of inside to outside, of room to room. They were in the Somewhere Else, the same space occupied by distant lanterns across the flatlands. The kind of space that felt unreal, that Emma imagined she could hold in her hands and fold up, that room and that fire and those men.

At her side, Faraday shifted restlessly. His jaw was set and mulish, and one of his hands rested on his holster.

She waited, barely willing to breathe.

There was, she thought, someone else home.

 

**xxv.**

 

“It’s been some time,” the Voice said, “since I’ve seen such a nice fire.”

It had a peculiar sound—more timbers quavering than speech, more rusted hinge than human. Vasquez thought it might be coming from the left corner at his back, but he felt unable to twist around to see what was there. An impression sat just out of sight. A man had not been in the outpost, but now he was, and had always been, slumped in the absence of light with a presence both kind and bone-chilling.

“Bet it gets mighty cold come winter,” Sam Chisolm said. He put a hand on Vasquez’s shoulder, a silent request to remain still. But neither money nor all of the torn bounties in this hemisphere would’ve moved Vasquez. He felt frozen, caught in a web between two great forces.

“Oh,” said the Voice. “I haven’t felt it,” he added some time later.

“When was the last time you stepped out and about?”

“I don’t go out much anymore. World’s gotten hard and full of devils. I took a walk—a few years ago, or ten—it’s hard to say—and was admiring the light of God and His work. I am a listener of his Words, you see.”

“You’re in good company, Mr. Horne,” said Sam Chisolm.

“I could tell. Fine men such as yourself…” Horne sighed with his whole body and it swept through the trading post, touched the back of Vasquez’s neck, and faded away. “But not all men are such caliber. There were game hunters. Like myself, but ungodly creatures. No animal ever came to their call. Broke a rock on my head and robbed me of all my earthly possessions, and some of my spirit besides. They took for Fort Bascom, but I trailed them the whole of four days. Got back what was mine. Got back some of what was theirs, too.”

Vasquez slowly looked up again at the ceiling. Those strange markings, etched hard against the wood grain. By the firelight, he was able to discern that there was coloring in them, a rusted maroon crust of blood that had frozen in early frost and never gone away. He noticed for the first time that some of the old skins left pinned and dangling from the rafters and porch railing were not the skins of badgers, rabbit, or deer.

He remained very still. Then he shook himself and forced his neck to twist, his head to turn toward the back corner.

It would, he thought, be wise to say those men had gotten what they deserved. But Vasquez was not particularly wise.

“Do you feel any better for it?” he asked.

Sam Chisolm was careful not to move an inch. But Vasquez had the sense he was readying to shoot.

Horne stood. His shadow cast itself long across the floor, hanging on Vasquez like a noose, dimming the fire. He seemed as tall as the rafters and patched in gray as a specter would be, lacking all the colors of his God. “What did you say?” he said, his register opening dark and round and big.

Vasquez didn’t raise from his crouch. He calmed his heart in case Horne mistook him for one of his rabbits. “I asked if you felt better for it,” he said. “Only, if you haven’t left this place since then, and you have tried so hard to fade out of this world of devils, I wonder if it helped at all.”

“Are you saying I’m afraid?”

“I am saying…” Vasquez struggled, then exhaled. “This is a nice fire, eh? But I didn’t need to come along and build it. You could do that yourself.” He added, “I am saying, maybe you should build more fires if you like them so much.”

For reasons he didn’t understand, Vasquez sensed Sam Chisolm relax; it was an unmistakable sinking of pressure, a passing storm. “Somethin’ to that,” said Sam Chisolm, chuckling. He hooked a hand under Vasquez’s arm and pulled him to his feet, and suddenly it was an easy thing to stand and to look into the corner.

Horne was only a grizzled older man with a full beard and sad, moony eyes. He looked on them and held the hem of his shirt in each big hand. At some point, a bird had nested on his shoulder and the remnants of the nest remained there, unnoticed.

“More nice fires where we’re goin’ now,” Sam Chisolm told him. “Some good folk left in this world and they need our help. I hoped you might decide to join us, Mr. Horne. If you felt ready to get out again.”

But the clarity in Horne wasn’t lasting; already he was ashen and appeared a trick of the light, his attention caught by something only he could see. He turned from them and put his hand over his mouth, bowed under some weight. “Go on now,” he said, weak and warbly. “Not much light left to clear these hills. Go on then. This is another story, ain’t it? I’ll leave it for another time.” His left side listed first, then his shoulders and most of his head, and then he was gone altogether.

Sam Chisolm and Vasquez waited, but the opportunity had passed. They left the fire going, though, as he’d liked it so much. When they stepped out into the land and open sky, Vasquez took big gulps of the fresh air and scrubbed his face free of the lingering film of age and madness made lovers. He didn’t realize Faraday was at his side until the man took him by the wrist, pressing his bones hard until Vasquez let him see his face.

“What the hell was that?”

Vasquez wasn’t sure how to describe it. “Horne,” he said, gesturing. “He’s still… there.”

Faraday made a face that wasn’t easily labeled. “That thing even people still?”

“Still people.”

“Didn’t look like it from here. You got the heebie jeebies?”

“What are they,” said Vasquez, puzzled. It made Faraday laugh, though, so probably he had no reason to know.

Goodnight interrupted them. “Way I’m hearing it, we’re out a man and ought to be on our way. Some snakes best left slumbering where they’ve laid. I don’t fancy making camp outside of its den, either.”

“Break’s over,” said Sam Chisolm. “We can go a little further. Mr. Horne won’t be bothering us, but all kinds are drawn to these spaces. Let’s not risk the draw.”

There was some truth to that, Vasquez thought. He unknotted his mare from the railing and rubbed the smooth velvet of her nose, huffing at her. They had come in kinship, but the post and its occupant were battered to the frame. Perhaps one day, time would rot the last of the beams and moss would blanket the stonework left behind, and at last Horne could find some peace in being under sunshine and the call of the hermit thrush.

 

**xxvi.**

 

They made camp for the night in the birch-white foothills, cradled in between the rock and sand. The fire lit tall shapes that rivaled Sam Chisolm’s and the stars were so riotous that it was hard to pick them apart. Despite their failure to increase the number of the party, Faraday felt that their spirits were high. The danger was yet before them, but it was days away, hardly more than a pinprick on the horizon.

“What is it you can do, son?” Goodnight asked him, his bare feet propped up next to the fire. He didn’t seem to notice the heat or the implied dangers of a night under the moon, and might’ve been better placed on a settee. Every so often he would offer his flask, which was wrapped in supple leather, to Billy for a swig.

Faraday waggled his eyebrows. “What don’t I do?”

“He’s quite the shooter,” said Sam Chisolm. “Heard some tales about his luck with the ladies, as well.”

“Aw, it’s nothing,” Faraday told them. “Say the right words in the right tone at the right time? Works like a peach.”

“Don’t say,” said Goodnight, interested. And boy, didn’t Faraday love an audience, so he turned to Teddy Q who was sipping from a silver flask at his side and affected a grin that had stripped some folk of their stockings before.

“Don’t suppose,” he drawled, “you’d wanna share that there whiskey with a humble hand like myself? _Parched_ , I am.” He held out his hand.

Teddy Q stared at him. He gave him the flask. “Keep it,” he said, sounding strangled.

“Interesting,” Goodnight mused. His hawk eyes took in Teddy Q’s increasing pallor and confusion—and how on its heels a minute later, he shrunk into himself and scowled. “Powers of persuasion indeed.”

“So you basically talk a lot,” said Vasquez. “This surprises no one, _güero_.”

Faraday flipped him off and took a pull from the flask. It wasn’t much better than rotgut, but it’d do.

“That would be useful,” said Billy with more animation than Faraday had ever seen from him. He studied Faraday across the fire. “It has its limits?”

“There’s some tricks to it. Gotta start with an idea, an impulse, that’s already there. It can be small, even indirect. Man’s gotta be thirsty to drink. Woman’s gotta be wanting to take. Sometimes I can push it—really twist an idea to stick to somethin’ they wouldn’t normally do—but that’s hit and miss. And I ain’t in the business of messing with someone that ain’t deserved it,” he added as an afterthought. “Just so you know. If it takes more n’ a nudge, there’s no pleasure to be had.”

“You sayin’ I wanted to give you my shine?” Teddy Q asked.

“You’re a giver,” said Faraday, generously. “Givin’ people always are open to givin’ more.”

“Some truth to that,” Emma said, her pale round face made more so by the flames. “But an awful lot of power, Mr. Faraday.”

Faraday gave her a sickly sort of grin without meaning to. He toasted her and took another pull from the flask. It burned all the way down and settled ill.

They had little to say for a while. Then Billy stirred, turned to Teddy Q, sized him up with the detachment of a butcher measuring a shoulder cut, and said, “Can you shoot or is the gun for show?”

“I can shoot,” said Teddy Q defensively.

“So you can’t shoot,” Billy said. He got up and Faraday witnessed a strange, silent exchange between him and Goodnight. “Come on. You can show me on one of those trees. Then I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong.”

“That’s just—” Teddy Q stopped, then grunted. “Okay.”

They all piled up to follow except for Goodnight and Sam Chisolm, which Faraday reckoned was the entire point of the exercise. He pondered the merits of staying put, but he wanted the opportunity to make fun of their younger benefactor more, and Vasquez was already arguing with Billy over who’d get to teach him. That was something Faraday wanted to see, too. 

He thought maybe Vasquez would be a poor shot. He also thought he’d really, really like to be proved wrong.

 

**xxvii.**

 

The first bullet whistled not far from the campsite, followed by uproarious laughter and mockery. “Hey now, I’m warming up!” Teddy Q protested, but even that was buried under three different men attempting to offer “the grail” on shooting stationary trunks. They were only just visible at the far reach of the firelight—treated better by the moon.

If he looked long enough, Goodnight could see Billy yet: the fine movement of his body, the subtle humor that edged the corners of his mouth.

He let himself do that. It made everything easier, concentrating on Billy. They didn’t stay in groups of people for long and for good reason. Given enough time, Goodnight would begin to hear the tremble of their pulse and the vulnerability of each breath taken too quick—it would build sweet under his tongue and unbearably loud in his head—and that plump feast would bring what chased him to their door. It had found him in the field during the war, a soft tickling of feathers across his cheek, and it had followed him at a measured but relentless pace ever since. He could feel the shadow of its vast wingspan creeping up the walls and passing over the ground and gently rippling the water—it came for him and his people, imbued with a demonic hunger. It fell heavy on their backs and stared into Goodnight with sour yellow emptiness while it lifted away and left only indiscriminate corpses in its wake. 

Sooner or later, the owl cried soft in the dark for them all.

(One day, he feared it would swallow Billy, too.)

But tonight was not that night. The shadow was many miles from them, and Goodnight thought that if there was any group safe from its hunger, this might be the one. They were all of them more than men.

Some more noticeably than others. “Curious thing,” said Goodnight, off-hand to Sam.

“Hm?”

“When you went in to see Horne, you took the Not-a-Texican.”

“That was a thing I did,” Sam agreed.

“It just seems to me to be an unusual choice. To bring a Good Samaritan in when you had your pick of fine talented folk. To ask him, in particular, to build a fire.”

Sam tipped his head this way and that as if considering the words. “Didn’t go so badly,” he said.

“Which is a curious thing in itself.” Goodnight eyed his old friend, fingertip worrying at the grooves in the rim of his flask. “That little blood memory trick on the trail about our grandfathers? Then building a fire in a hearth that was poisoned against bending to another man’s will. And I hear tell he _killed_ a ranger. Sam, now—that is no Good Samaritan.”

“Fixes a good breakfast like one.”

“I’m sure he can rustle cattle, weed a garden, fix a roof, and lend his handkerchief as well as the rest of them,” said Goodnight. “But anyone can do that. He is no Good Samaritan, Sam. What _is_ he?”

There was a burst of renewed laughter from the tree line and another three shots, followed each by hoops and hollering. “You’re making him worse!” Faraday bellowed, sounding truly outraged. “Stick to your knives!”

“This is _how I make my living_ ,” Billy said.

“He’s used to shooting at coyotes to scare them from the goats,” Vasquez said slyly. “Maybe he needs an uglier target. _Güero_ , what do you say?”

“I don’t wanna shoot at Mr. Faraday,” said Teddy Q. “He might kill me back.”

Sam watched them tussle and there was an ember in him, burning too bright to look upon with the naked eye. It twisted and writhed. It was approaching _eager_.

Goodnight couldn’t help the sharp inhale that escaped him. “You think he’s a goddamn—”

“Don’t,” said Sam, softly. “Could be. Could be wrong, too. Better not to give names that aren’t ours to accept.”

“Of course. You’re right. But that would be—that would be something, Sam.”

Sam smiled at him. “It really would.”

At peace, Goodnight offered him the flask to drink from, glad to be sharing a fire with a good man once again. He let himself go languid, all the tension flooding from his bones as water. Sighed the last of the fear out. “What a road you’ve put us on, Sam. You’ll keep your head, won’t you?”

“I do like my head where it rests.”

“Only, she’s the same age as your sister would’ve been.”

Sam blinked slowly up at the stars. “That she is. Same spirit, too. Won’t lower her eyes for nobody, no how.”

“You carry her, brother,” said Goodnight. “Don’t look for her in Mrs. Cullen or in anyone else’s bearing. You carry her and she’s with us yet, listening to the chimes at midnight and drinking in that sky.”

“Oh that sky,” Sam whispered, and said no more.

 

**xxviii.**

 

In the early hours of the morning, Sam uncurled himself from sleep without a sound. He heard the heavy snuffling of life around him, a high whistling snore that Faraday would never admit to, and the low crackle of the dying fire. It had life yet, though, and a mountainous man was warming his hands at its altar. 

Jack Horne met Sam’s gaze across the meager glow. “What a nice fire,” he said as soft as could be.

Six was a good number for a party, Sam thought, relaxing back into his pack. He nodded to Horne and closed his eyes, determined to sleep another hour.

 

**xxvix.**

 

Breakfast was the last of Vasquez’s dried pork and some vibrant greens and rice that Billy shared, mixed and fried hard over what remained of the fire. Emma thought it was an unusual dish, but it filled her belly and made sense in her mouth. She even took half of Teddy Q’s share when he begged it off on account of his head aching, having had too much to drink during and after his nightly lesson. He was still a little sore at them, but Emma thought he was softening already. He missed his father, and by the time they’d passed out on hard ground, he’d managed to hit the knot in the tree trunk at ten paces.

“What the hell is in that flask,” groaned Faraday, chewing on the biggest hunk of pork. He glared balefully at Teddy Q, his hat pulled low over his eyes.

“Red eye,” said Teddy Q.

“You’ll feel better after you’ve gotten it out one way or another,” Emma told him.

Faraday was a picture of dismay and horror. “And what’s that mean?”

Stirring the cherry red ashes, Vasquez started to laugh. “Hope you at least get to choose the end, _güero_!”

Emma was sore and heartsick and bent on justice—but it turned out she had room enough to laugh, too.

Sitting in their midst, Horne gave a peculiar smile as if he had no practice at it. He gave off an impression of being completely still while also being wracked with the jitters of a paranoid drunk, but Emma had found him nothing but courteous since the initial fright of waking up to his presence. Whatever monstrousness he’d occupied in the trading post, he had left behind there, too.

“Take it far from camp either way, son,” said Goodnight.

“Now look here—”

“Smell that?” Horne said abruptly.

They all paused, all of them—he hadn’t said much beyond _please_ and _thank you kindly_ and _that is an unusual meal_. 

“What smell?” asked Sam Chisolm, getting to his feet. He lifted his chin and scented the air, too, already in search.

“The smoke?” Vasquez asked doubtfully.

“There’s blood on fast feet,” said Horne. He pointed to the north where the way was open through the cliffsides, then gestured for them to be silent. Picked up his rifle and a long knife, and suddenly Emma remembered why he unnerved her so.

But that was nothing compared to the fear gone buttermilk-sour in her throat and belly when she looked on that direction and saw the painted man.

(She had heard the stories. They all had, living where they did in Rose Creek. _Don’t reckon we’ll ever see one in our lifetime_ , Matthew had said once, but he still set the rifle by their bed before sleeping and trained himself to keep an eye on the horizon. His words were only empty hopes in a world growing smaller and tighter, with less to go around to more.)

“Please tell me I’m seeing things,” Faraday said tersely. He was on his feet with both guns out, same as Vasquez, hanging back behind a cropping of rock. Vasquez took point without a word, but he was as rigid as steelwork.

“Where there’s one, there’s more,” Goodnight said. “Sam? Sam, do you see—?”

“Don’t be hasty,” said Sam Chisolm. His calm was a salve, although Emma saw the wariness in him. “Hold your fire. Stay sharp.” He approached the specter with his hands held high.

He spoke, and Emma knew none of those sounds. Those words.

There was stark marigold red painted across his forehead, black lined down the middle, and a clever pattern dotted across his cheeks and chin. He had an unreadable expression but the set of his mouth wasn’t cruel; he was terrifying despite the apparent placidity. A deer was slung over the bare back of the horse, eyes clouded and milky. His horse was as painted as he was, eyes circled in smoky gray and hide a song of palmprints. The painted man had tied them interchangeably in color and line.

Sam Chisolm spoke to him for some time.

Then the painted man laid the deer across the ground and took out a knife. He sawed into its belly and dug inside and his arms were as red as his face paint, and Emma thought of standing in front of her burning church, her husband’s blood up to her elbows. She had a visceral instant of perfect understanding. That, to the both of them, such viscera was only a marker of living this hard life. 

The painted man held a dripping liver in his hands and waited.

While they watched, Sam Chisolm looked between the liver and the deer split open on the dirt. He hooked his teeth into the deer’s hide, then the flank, then the feet, then the belly and neck and head. He swallowed it whole, at once too large and too terrible to look upon directly, but Emma could hear the noise of it, the crunching and squelching. When she looked again, there was no mess except a bit of ear too gristly to chew.

“Guess breakfast wasn’t enough for him,” Billy said.

Sam Chisolm came back to the campfire, hiccupping some. “His name is Red Harvest,” he said. “He’s going to come with us because that’s the path revealed to him and because if he doesn’t, we’re set to die. So he says. And so I believe him. Fix him a plate, Vasquez? It’s good manners to offer.”

“Is he…?” Emma stopped, unable to articulate her question—all of her questions.

Although his smile was more of a grimace, Sam Chisolm did his best to reassure her. “If I’m your fighting dog,” he said, “that man is a bear. But he’s a bear who’s with us.”

In the distance, Red Harvest ripped a hunk of flesh from the liver and surveyed them with the discernment of a hunter. He looked on Emma a long time, long enough that she ought to have been uncomfortable, but instead she felt an iron-hard ball lodge in her gullet that kept her chin lifted. She was tethered between the physicality of Matthew’s corpse buried where she couldn’t reach it and the sublimity of his soul safely raftered in paradise, also where she couldn’t reach it; however raw the deal was, she could not deny that she felt alive in a way she hadn’t for years. Red Harvest would not scare her anymore. Bogue would not scare her. She walked with _giants_ and was not less.

They rode out: seven tall tales set on righteousness, a young farmhand, and a woman who was more than a widow.


	4. fly rookery and the cellar in the barn (faraday learns how vasquez came to be wanted and wants him for entirely separate reasons)

**xxvx.**

 

Goodnight Robicheaux was born to a family steeped in southern pedigree and wealth, the only son who lived past infancy. His brothers and sister all died in degrees, ghosting out and taking part of his mother with them. The last, his younger brother Theodore, remained a specter who cried in the halls and from beyond the fields long after his body grew blue and cold and hard as a fossil.

In a sense, Goodnight was truly born with a silver spoon in his mouth—a small piece of cutlery with a robin-egg blue inlay on the handle—but he was no stranger to hardship and how his station meant little in terms of character. What remained of his breeding only showed in his education, his speech, and his enjoyment of the latest fashions. He had gone to fight in a war that only brought them ruin; good breeding meant shit and blood and piss, the same as anything meant on a battlefield. He had not thought himself particular skilled at killing, but he’d believed in certain ideals. The first time Goodnight steadied his rifle and took a shot, he split open a boy’s head—cracked his skull and tarnished the feathered brown of his hair and the cherry sweetness of his mouth open in surprise—and all those ideals became so much rot when he realized that the dead when embraced were as warm-bodied as the unlucky sons of bitches who soldiered on. 

But that was not the story that got told. It never was, except by Goodnight when he’d had enough drink, when Billy’s body heat bled into his own and they were safe and quiet in the dark together. _He expired in my arms and I don’t think he ever kissed anybody in his life_ , he whispered there.

No, people loved a gentile killer. They said that Goodnight Robicheaux fought like the devil was on his back or like he was facing him in the field. Fifty-three confirmed kills at Sharpsburg, each as uncanny as the last. A signaling turn in the tide for the south, they said, a golden son sent to do the good work. He picked them off like cans on a fence— _pop pop pop pop_ —some so far away that the only way he discerned that they were the enemy was the dark forage caps they wore to the field. They fell by his hand like a soft wave had crossed the matted grass and churned mud. One. Then two. Then more.

Toy soldiers left in scattered lines. Four, then eight. Twelve. _More_.

Within weeks, he was one of Connolly’s sharpshooters. They called him the Angel of Death. By then, he was already relying heavily on the bottle. Thought maybe the shakes would ruin his success.

He was well and truly fermented in the Battle of Fredericksburg, a hazard who couldn’t manage to walk in a straight line. He lined up his shots. Eighteen dead in so many minutes. Then more. They had the high ground; it was like picking off fish in a barrel. He could barely see anything more than colors: navy blue and gray and red and black and green and red and gray and red.

It was as if Death itself had ridden between the sea of men, they said later, quieting all in his path. A hush fell on the city and surrounding fields at every whistling bullet. The shadow lapped up against their knees and the tired and poorly used fell as if cut from their strings. It got so that some didn’t even feel the bite of the gunshot; they fell, dead at an instant, from the mere touch of his intention.

No one liked to talk about how not all of the fallen were sons of the north. Or how the death toll was only rising. Dozens, then nearing a hundred. Then _higher_.

_Could’ve won the war_ , his father said after he’d come staggering home, held together only by the grace of Sam Chisolm’s forgiveness and a new outlook on how he might want to live his life, if it was yet worth living. _Might’ve if not for the damn work of the government. But you did well, Goodnight. Hear tell that you’re a legend now. Heard you brought the cold touch down on their necks._

(They did like to say that. They didn’t say how after three nights pacing the hallways of his once-revered home, Goodnight woke in an inhuman silence on the fourth. The shadow had come in his sleep and crept into the nooks and crannies. The maid was bent half-finished over the silver, polishing rag in her hand. The stable master was sitting on his rocking chair. His father remained in bed, his mustache as gray as the caps had been, no wiser. The cold touch only left his mother with breath to whisper by, and whisper she did, stricken and pale, until mercy took her in the weeks after.)

Goodnight Robicheaux was followed by his name and reputation wherever he so fled afterwards. He couldn’t outrun it, and it only took a few towns that suffered from a sudden outbreak of fevers and bandit attacks before he realized there was more he was outrunning besides. He kept to himself. He kept moving.

The first time he met Billy, they’d sat down together in that wrecked bar in Dallas and shared a bottle of bourbon. Struck by loneliness, Goodnight confessed his story when he at last became drunk enough to stand it. 

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Billy told him. His nails were neatly cut and his smiles were only pried out with some degree of self-injury on Goodnight’s part. That was before he knew him, before Goodnight loved him best.

And none of his tall tales were about that night, but it was his favorite story anyhow.

 

**xxvxi.**

 

It was a little under two days’ ride left to Rose Creek and they made good time the first, bearing the blistering heat of the sun with no complaint. Billy didn’t care much for all of this riding at such a stringent pace, but he knotted his hair at the base of his neck, settled his hat firm, and tuned halfway into the idling conversation that rolled between Goodnight and the elusive Sam Chisolm, who Billy knew by name and tale but had never met. He knew how much Goody cared about him and that was enough. The rest was negligible.

Besides, he was having something like—fun. Billy wasn’t used to being around people anymore, not since he started riding with Goodnight. Goodnight didn’t do crowds, didn’t do friends, didn’t do _long stays_ on account of his concern for what might happen. It wasn’t that Billy missed people—could do without most of them—but this was different.

Behind him, Faraday and Vasquez were trading barbs. They hadn’t stopped for the past hour, chasing after each other’s last words like hounds on a scent. 

“All I’m sayin’ is you can’t have _that_ many interesting stories to tell,” Faraday was saying. “Only so much a person can stand of waterholes and fence mending and the like. Maybe a horse got out and you chased ‘im down. Right calamity, that.”

“That is a thing that has happened,” Vasquez agreed. “What a shame I have no stories about talking at women until they’ll do anything to shut me up, hm?”

“I am the world’s _greatest lover_ ,” said Faraday with some injury.

“Oh, of course. I forgot. You never mention that one.”

“I am _helpful_ in much more fun ways than you are.”

“Only once. Or twice. An hour.”

“I can’t believe you’ve never even heard of me. You didn’t live in a secluded cabin that long.”

“Why would I want to hear about another man pleasuring women?” Vasquez asked him frankly, which was yet another reason Billy decided they’d get along. He, too, cared very little for those kinds of stories unless they ended up mayhem. Goodnight had a few of those—scar stories, he called them, on account of his own amusing antecedent about how he’d gotten the little white line under his chin, covered quite well by the goatee.

As if he knew Billy was thinking about it, Goodnight glanced his way and grinned. Billy lifted his eyebrows and let himself smile.

“He has a point, son,” said Goodnight. “Why would you want to impress that particular reputation on poor Vasquez here?”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” said Vasquez.

“It’s just somethin’ I take a lot of pride in,” Faraday told them crossly. “Everyone else seems to get a hoot out of it.”

“A what?” asked Vasquez.

“He wants you to laugh,” said Billy.

Faraday turned to him slowly like a lizard turning its head. “That is not what I want,” he said, emphasizing each word.

Billy shrugged at him. He was pretty sure he wasn’t wrong, but then Faraday didn’t seem to care or even notice that his radius from one particular member of the party was growing shorter and shorter.

On the other hand, Vasquez seemed to consider that at some length. He adjusted his hat and snuck a look of entreaty at Billy, but all Billy could do was shrug again. There was a reason he left the talking to Goodnight on the whole. His patience was a shallow well.

“I have a funny story about a woman,” said Vasquez hesitantly. “It’s not—a tale, of course. But it’s a funny story.”

Faraday sulked a little more, then said, “Yeah?”

“I found her coach broken down on the road. She tried to rip my shirt off. Because it was _so hot_ , as if that made any sense.”

“She what? Okay, now you gotta tell me.”

Vasquez appeared ill at ease telling tales, even silly little personal ones, which was something else Billy understood well. But in a few minutes, the whole group was roped into listening and guffawing about the unreasonable demands of a married woman with too much questionable romance in her head, and they spent a long time of the ride trading this or that moment of embarrassment—the time Goody swore he was a walking, talking inflection of the pox to get an elderly matron to stop groping him, the day that Sam Chisolm accidentally got lost in Kansas because every town looked the same in Kansas, how once, because he didn’t always see sin until it was right in his face, literally, Horne almost got smothered by a saloon girl’s breasts for offering her a handkerchief. Even Red Harvest, who largely seemed to ignore their discussions, if he understood them at all, looked relaxed and amused.

Goodnight idled in next to Billy, knee nudging knee as they rode on. At one point, when Emma was describing her late husband’s predilection for pretending to know words he quite obviously didn’t, Billy realized that Goodnight had two fingers hooked into his belt. Just there. Just feeling him, the living in him.

No one said a word about it. Billy felt a powerful sensation come over him; it was the closest thing he’d felt to flying, a sort of windfall and soaring. Much like when he’d found Goodnight in that bar, he had the idea that the world was turning and soon everything would change. These people, mismatched as they seemed, howling over schoolboy jokes, were good people.

He clasped Goodnight’s hand against him and let him feel what it was like when Billy laughed.

 

**xxvxii.**

 

They camped for the night on the open desert, which made Vasquez feel vulnerable and safe at the same time. There was too much vastness to feel comfortable, but at least he could see someone coming in any direction from far off. The pitch black was heavy because there was so much of it unbroken around them. They left it too long; he had to make the fire by a small tin lantern that Horne carried with him.

Speaking of which, Vasquez felt a gaze alight and remain firm on him, and he looked up from the dry mash he was putting together to meet it. Horne sat across from him and was watching his workings with an unsettling intensity.

“ _Pasa algo_?” he asked, unnerved enough to forget his tongue.

Horne didn’t seem to notice. “Very fine,” he said. “You—you make a good fire. I had noticed as much, before.”

“It’s one of my many skills,” Vasquez allowed.

“I’ve always thought there was an art to the craft. A skilled understanding of what nature has gifted and how not to destroy unnecessarily.” Horne picked up a piece of the hedge wood that Vasquez purloined from the naked, broken fencing they’d crossed a few miles back. Hedge burned long and hot. He thought Horne must know that, too, because he nodded his approval. “And of course, there are sometimes other factors—afflictions of character that can bend a flame for ill or gain—and God’s will is that some should fear no inferno, so that they might walk the paths least taken.”

“You wonder what my secret is? It isn’t a divine grace—I wouldn’t trust a fire I couldn’t control.” Shrugging, Vasquez bent to his business again, weaving the dry mash in between the wood with care. “Maybe it’s a part of who I am, eh? Fires are built to care for people, to make them warm and comforted. So I feel good making a fire. When you feel good doing anything, you come to do it well.”

“Truth in that, too,” said Horne.

Red Harvest joined them; he didn’t have a bedroll to set up, no clutter to shift through. He made a thoughtful noise at Vasquez’s work, but offered no attempt at communication. Vasquez nodded to him, anyway.

It wasn’t long before the blaze was going strong and then Vasquez felt better about their location. He stripped his vest and took off his boots to air his feet by the flames, liking the sensitivity of his callused soles, how it bordered on too much heat. Wordlessly, Red Harvest shucked off his hard-soled leather leggings and did the same, staying close.

Faraday thumped hard on the sand next to Vasquez, already soused with the drink. “What the hell are you two doing?” he asked, but his belligerence was tempered by the fact he immediately reached for his own boot laces.

Red Harvest lifted one foot, and Vasquez did the same to match him. They teased the fire and then shrunk back when it got too close. _He’s young_ , thought Vasquez.

Faraday flung his boots behind him and stretched out. Then he burped. Then he said, “Once, I tried to talk a man into lowering the price of a room for rent. He kept bumping up the price every time I tried and then I was too ornery to give up and refuse payment, so I paid a week’s lodging for a night. But don’t worry—I got him back. Or maybe it’s better to say ol’ Jack did, if you can read between those lines.”

Across from them, Goodnight snorted.

Vasquez liked these kinds of tales much more than the ones Faraday was trying to tell him earlier in the day. “Once, I came across a young lady searching for her missing cat. But I couldn’t find it,” he admitted, “so I found another cat that looked similar. She didn’t seem to notice the difference.”

“Have you thought that maybe it was actually the _right_ cat?”

“Cats,” said Billy gravely. “Don’t trust a cat.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Teddy Q said.

“You’re only sore,” said Emma, “because they don’t take to you. You’re too eager.”

“Lot like a lady,” Faraday told him. “You have to move slow, pretend you don’t care about whether she sticks around or not. She’ll like you more if it’s her idea.”

Vasquez chuckled. “Is that your strategy?”

Without taking his eyes off of their bare feet, which were resting in the sand only an inch apart, Faraday said in a strange tone of voice, “You’d be surprised how well it works.”

 

**xxvxiii.**

 

It was a night that felt like they weren’t sharing it with any other living creature—all the world, Faraday thought, and the great emptiness of it rang. A bottle dry as bone, green as glass.

“Drink?” he offered, yanking out the flask of rotgut he’d purloined from Teddy Q, the only ailment for such feelings.

“No, no,” said Vasquez. “Not _that_. It’ll eat away all my insides.”

“Your loss,” Faraday told him. “But I can’t fault your sense. Last night in the open for a while. Tomorrow night, I can finally get a decent glass of rye. Lord have mercy.”

“You’ve given Him little reason to sympathize.”

“Blasphemy.”

“Coming from the walking blasphemy…” Vasquez chuckled to himself for a while; it was pleasant enough, so Faraday let him have the last word. They were something approaching companionable and that was new enough to Faraday. He wasn’t in any way certain what he’d done to earn it.

The others were quieting around them and fallen to sleep—he could hear the great Sam Chisolm’s breathing coming out a little heavy with all that bigness in him—and he waited a while longer just as precaution. Red Harvest lay awake and silent, dark eyes caught up in the skies, but Faraday didn’t reckon he spoke any English. When he was sure they were as alone as they could be, he kicked Vasquez’s boot and said, “Your turn.”

“Hm? I haven’t got much more in the way of stories, _güero_. Unless you’re biting at the reins to hear more about water holes and mischievous cows.”

“There’s one story you ain’t told me,” said Faraday, hoping he sounded more nonchalant than he felt. 

Vasquez squinted at him and seemed to find his answer. He rolled his eyes and made a dismissive gesture. “You want to know about Fly Rookery.”

Faraday vaguely recalled the name as a town, some middling place far south of this piece of countryside. Weak, watery booze. Hard place with hard people. “That where you kicked off your life of crime?” he drawled.

“It’s not so good a story.”

“I can’t believe that. I won’t.”

Scrounging in the sand, Vasquez hummed. He plucked and unbraided a dried, withered root from the earth, something ill-made for the climate. “There was a widow with a fence in disrepair,” he said at last, studying his prize. “Flash flood. I stopped for two days and fixed the damage. Gave it a coat of whitewash after, even though I should have been back on the road. Eh, I was worried.” He looked at Faraday, the fire caught in his eyes. “Her son was missing. And some of the cattle. One by one, they would go missing, too.”

Faraday looked back at him. He didn’t say anything, but unease stirred in him like a shadow beneath the water.

“So I stay.” Vasquez shrugged. “I search for them. Comb the hills. The river. A part of me expected to find the bodies rolled up like caterpillars on the bank, filled with water and blood. But there was nothing. The people are quiet, too quiet.”

“Ill omen,” said Faraday, knowing what he meant.

“Oh yes.”

Faraday offered him the flask again. This time, Vasquez took him up on it. He took a long pull that worked his throat. Didn’t make it much easier for the words to tumble out, though, because they were rough when he spoke again, dragged over hard ground. “Then. There was a child,” he said. “She went missing. From town.”

“Shit.”

“I could not—you understand. There are ways of listening. I used them.” Vasquez pressed the flask to his mouth again, but he didn’t drink, only held it there. His eyes despite the fire were formless and dark now. “There was a house. A ranger who lived a mile from town. He was only home a few months of each year. I suppose,” Vasquez said, bitterly, “he grew _bored_. He had a cellar beneath his barn. He had—there were—”

Then he stopped. He said nothing else and he didn’t have to.

Faraday wished he hadn’t asked.

Vasquez shook himself free of whatever gripped him. “It took some time,” he admitted. “I was not prepared and he—it took some time. But I put a bullet in that son of a bitch’s brain. And I walked out of town and I did not look back.”

“Did he hurt you?” Faraday asked, and he didn’t recognize his own voice.

Vasquez stared into the fire. He didn’t speak for a while. “He hurt a lot of people,” he finally said. “He was a bad man.”

Faraday felt his gorge rise up with all manner of reckless words, but he caught each one before they escaped. He didn’t trust himself. He wanted to do something, but the violent impulse faded, as swiftly spent as the sparks careening bright and wild from the kindling. To give his hands an outlet, he took his matchbox and wasted two sticks to re-light his cigarette. “Fuck,” he exhaled.

“It’s not such a good story,” said Vasquez. He offered Faraday the flask back.

“Fuck,” Faraday said again. “Keep it. You sure he’s dead?”

“He’s dead,” confirmed Vasquez with no little satisfaction.

“All right.”

Vasquez gave him a little side-eye, like maybe he was thinking about asking what Faraday planned to do if the answer had been otherwise. But he didn’t ask and Faraday didn’t offer. To say it would’ve been to show his hand too soon.

Still, Faraday kept him company until it was time to wake Horne for his watch. And even after he settled on his blanket, he remained awake and took some comfort in seeing Vasquez alive and ornery and well—the slackness of his face in sleep, the way he would sometimes stir and finger the cigarillos in his vest out of habit, then sleep again, turned into the poor pillow his hat made. _You’re a damned fool_ , Faraday thought, mostly to himself.

But he was a fool in good company. At some point Horne began to hum, a low baritone that Faraday felt in the earth beneath him, and he sang a solemn dirge about a forester looking for a golden fall of water. Faraday was going to ask how it ended, but a dreamless slumber overtook him, dredging him across its shores.

 

**xxvix.**

 

Red Harvest stayed awake long after the disharmonious sounds of sleep were carried onward to the far lands. The smoke eked into the sky and dissipated as if they were not there at all; he could hear travelers under the shade of darkness a few miles to the west and had no desire to meet them on this road. But they would pass soon. Only Horne was awake now, swaying in front of the fire and mumbling to himself in constant conflict as he kept watch.

When it got too chilly, Red Harvest covered his feet again and spared a look for Vasquez, who had fallen asleep and left his boots sagging on their side. He put them upright to keep small creatures from finding a sanctuary in them.

_He’s young_ , he thought.

“The stars are out for us,” said Horne, rapturous.

Red Harvest laid back on the sand and took his fill of them. The sky was a freckled sea always shifting, its lights bleating in an insurmountable distance. The moon was a plate empty of food; the horses were taken with its reflection.

And because it was only himself and Horne awake—and the white man was almost as old as Red Harvest and yet four times as broken—he lifted his palms up as if to bolster the atmosphere from some spell of unsteadiness.

When he lowered his hands, the stars came down with them.

“Oh,” said Horne. A fevered delight came across his face; it broke open on his smile. Tears filled his eyes. But good tears.

Red Harvest said in his own tongue, “ _You can touch them._ ”

In time, they would find their way back upwards. But for now, Red Harvest closed his eyes and felt the small spears of light float and bump into his cheekbone, his knuckles, as soft as dandelion seed. The stories of his past and his people came with them, a comfort he never tired of experiencing. He slept in their embrace; it was worth sleeping to dream.

 

**xxix.**

 

Emma woke first, which was an unusual turn of events. She lifted her skirt as she stepped over the bodies strewn around a dead fire. Even Horne was out cold, his hands fisted as if he were clenching something inside them. Daylight came pale and watered down, but there was light enough to see her way to her pack. She drank from her canteen and splashed her neck and face.

It was Goodnight, as he’d asked her to call him, who found her staring into the expanse. “Fine morning,” he said. “But no—you look cold, my dear.”

“We’ll be back in Rose Creek today,” said Emma.

“Are you afraid?”

She met his gaze. The question took the cold out of the morning and laced it back into her heart. “No,” she said, truthful. “I want to be back. I want to see what comes next. I want Bogue to pay for what he’s brought down on us. I rode out to find you and that’s what I did.”

Goodnight was pulling a kit of combs and brushes and shaving cream out of his pack; they were wrapped carefully in butter-soft suede. “My daddy used to say the man—begging your pardon, the person—who hungers for revenge will always overeat their capacity.”

“You mistake what I desire, sir.”

“Oh?”

“I seek righteousness,” she said. “As should we all. But I’ll settle for revenge. And then I will move on, and I will find a new place in this world without Matthew.”

Goodnight said very seriously, “I surely had mistaken you. My apologies, Emma. I can understand why Sam saw his likeness in you.”

She offered him a smile to show no ill feelings. But he seemed to remain uneasy, and she realized it had nothing to do with what she did or didn’t dream about when he shifted to imagined nonchalance and said, “You have, of course, heard about my reputation.”

“I know something of it,” she allowed.

“Then you know the risk inherent. I am not a man safe to be around, and your town will be under as much danger from me as they are from Bogue. I wouldn’t want to do you harm. Not you. We are, the whole of us, fond of you.”

Emma dismissed the odd sentiment with a wave. “I know something of it,” she repeated. “I have no sympathy for those that chose money over their own neighbors, and as for the rest of us… Well, I can’t speak for them, but I can speak for myself. I have no fear of what you bring, Goodnight.”

He gave her a wry smile. “I wish I could say the same with such conviction,” he said, not without a degree of wistfulness.

Behind them, the camp was stirring and getting to its mischief. She heard Faraday shout and then saw him shaking out his boot, flinging sand grains in every direction. They had crispy strips of scorpion seasoned over their breakfast and set off while the sun shook off its weariness like a hot lather.

Rose Creek waited.


	5. death is our own device (the magnificent seven ride into town and grow it up for battle)

**xxx.**

 

Rose Creek was a small formation of buildings and distant farmsteads, worn down by weather, ill luck, and Bogue’s malcontent. He’d left his mark on the town like a stain. Sam could feel it as surely as his horse’s supple coat and the pebble caught in the tip of his left boot. There was grief here, and love. There was desperation, too. The smoke from the mines curled on the horizon beyond like a question mark, and all the fields were soft combed-over ash from a fire left to burn too wild. The church was the crowning centerpiece, a burnt husk with a bleak veil falling across the whitewash and unpatched holes like eyelets.

Sam thought, as he often did, of his mama’s church. This was not the first one to suffer Bogue’s disdain for God.

He got off his horse and walked into town on the valley road. Billy walked with him, flanking his side. It might’ve been the image they cut—might’ve been Sam reaching out and growing into all the rooms and hallways and kettles surrounding them, getting lay of the land—but the townspeople scattered in their wake. Doors slammed shut and windows were shuttered. He marked each business: Elysium Hotel a lively hotbox and saloon, the laundry, the livery, Whitewater Wagons closed up for the season, a barber who had not, Platt & Taylor Hardware. 

Around them, the Blackstones took shape: men in the windows, on the balconies, winding into the road through the center of the town. Sam reached into them, too, and saw only the makings of something cheap.

“I’m not sure where to look for you,” said Billy.

“Everywhere,” Sam assured him.

A tall, pointed-faced weasel of a man with a trim beard met them on the road, the Sheriff quivering at his side. “Town’s got a ban on firearms,” he said. “And—whatever you’re doing, that’s not allowed either. Riling up the locals.”

Sam pressed his hand against his heart, and all the hands against all the hearts. He hummed and came together at once in a clear picture, although the weight of him was left heavy in the air. “Didn’t mean to cause a ruckus,” he said. He still had too many teeth; he tongued them until they aligned. “Beg your pardon. And you are?”

“He yours?” the man demanded of Billy.

“He’s really not,” Billy said.

“What the devil are you?” the Sheriff cried, clawing his hat from his sweaty head.

“And _you are_?” Sam repeated, the words pulsing in between oxygen and carbon, filling the spaces, irrepressible. The Sheriff flinched at their echo.

“I am—I am McDunn,” the man said, shaken for the first. “I am my… a product of my father’s making, I am _hungry_. For gold and for power. But they disappear into a hole in me, rarely enough. I wake in the night and sometimes my life feels thin as a rail, beleaguered, worn to the frame.” He stopped and covered his mouth and went pale.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it? A little common decency, some manners, and you could clean up fine and handsome.” Sam watched lazily as Faraday and Vasquez crept up the patios from the north. “Not that I expect as such from a Blackstone. Cowards to the quick, the lot of you. Back stabbers and union busters and hustlers and men sick on their own swords.”

“Now see here,” said McDunn, recovering some of his wits, “you don’t want to cause trouble in this town. You seen my men?”

“I saw some things that didn’t deserve the moniker. You seen mine?”

McDunn’s eyes swiveled in his head, though the rest of him remained frozen. Sam watched him take in the others in his party: Goodnight bringing up the rear with his rifle slung lazy into the crook of his arm, Horne coming in from the shadows of the undertaker. Six now, all itching for the excuse.

“Quite a batch of strays,” McDunn said.

Horne made a considering noise. “I’ll say a prayer for you,” he said, before pinching his fingers together. “You know, a little one.”

“Jack Horne, is it,” said McDunn, a fine sweat on him. But he was a little more steel than his lapdogs. More to prove—more thirst in him. “Thought you’d be all about pioneering. You were the first to find and take the resources of the land for yourself. Seems awfully… hypocritical.”

“Never wanted gold,” said Horne. “A man can’t chew on gold. Can’t build with it.”

“You do know who we work for?” McDunn asked, looking between them all.

“A plague. An infestation. A long whistling wet wound as gas escapes it.”

“The wrong man, if you don’t care for poetry,” said Faraday, fondling his guns, an eager fever in him that Sam could smell downwind.

McDunn slitted his eyes at Faraday. Sam knew he was thinking on his own hunger, relentless and unsustainable, and he knew how a man might come to hate the legend who could cajole anything he wanted out of another. “I don’t care for much about any of this,” McDunn said, and whistled.

Nothing happened.

They all of them waited for a suspended moment. Then, as McDunn began to erupt in an identical whistle, a body plummeted from the top of the bank. Its bones took to earth with some violence, but the bleed was slow.

Red Harvest stood. He lifted his bow and aimed again.

Four men fell to one arrow.

Chaos erupted.

 

**xxxi.**

 

Faraday wasn’t able to track most of the subsequent battle. He’d been in plenty of shootouts, but nothing like this—a fevered whirlwind of impossible feats, bullets and arrows and knives flying, men pitching themselves to the ground before they could be swept up in the wake of the savage assault. He was aware of Sam Chisolm and Vasquez taking the gaps he couldn’t fill, shooting at a nonstop pace— _too_ nonstop, he realized, wondering when Vasquez was finding the opportunity to reload his pistols—but in between the normal calamity of the firefight, he was equally aware, for the first time, that he was traveling with legends.

Hard to miss when Horne split the earth with his hatchet. The dirt opened like a gutted fish from Horne’s feet all the way up to the laundry.

The shy, lumbering giant was a frenzy of violence. Faraday could hear him howling— _Grant me clear vision! Clear sight!_ —on the periphery as he hacked into some poor soul’s head. He was growing. Growing bigger. As if he’d carried the timbers of his outpost with him, that liminal space of horror that had been wedged into his heart all along.

Faraday made sure to stay clear. He liked his scalp where it lay.

Red Harvest was felling more than guns could keep up with, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with a lightness that felt like magic to watch. He was doing something peculiar—something Faraday couldn’t track—where one of him felt like five, then like ten, then like twenty. Like the shadows were wearing many faces, all his own, and following him step by step.

“Okay, darlin’s mine,” Faraday whispered to his guns as the steel grew hot and well-loved in his hands. “Hit your targets, huh? Don’t wanna fall behind on the head count now.”

(He didn’t _have_ to talk them into shooting straight, but a little extra something never hurt his odds.)

There was only one tall tale Faraday had real concern about. But when he checked his surroundings, Goodnight Robicheaux, Angel of Death, had not loosed any visible harbinger on them. He saw the man stumbling like a drunk at the valley road, hissing at empty air, and felt a chill roll down his spine. But then another Blackstone was at Faraday’s left and he had other things to worry about. If the Angel of Death had performance issues, so much the better.

At some point, as the fighting began to dwindle, as the body count became higher than the remaining targets, Faraday felt Vasquez’s back press against his own.

“You’re _slow_ ,” he said, laughing.

Faraday finished reloading. “You should’ve been out eight bullets ago _at least_. Don’t talk to me.”

“I don’t run out of bullets,” Vasquez said, a little smugly.

Faraday shot out the silver tooth in a man’s maw. “You kiss your mother with that liar’s mouth?”

He swiveled on his foot to catch a Blackstone taking aim on Billy from the hardware store’s balcony, and Vasquez spun with him, spine to spine. “You’re the one counting, _güero_ ,” he said, even as he blew well past what his barrels could ever hope to accommodate.

_You extraordinary son of a bitch_ , thought Faraday. He did not stop to wonder that it wasn’t Horne’s insane display of strength, or Red Harvest’s deft and certain marksmanship, or Sam Chisolm’s ability to be more than any bag of skin or room or town could hold that caused his pulse to race and impressed him out of speech. It was this: the way it felt to fight as a duo, to be covered and cover in turn, like a kind of dance. Yeah. Like a dance.

 

**xxxii.**

 

When all but McDunn and the Sheriff laid dead in the streets, Faraday sauntered past Sam Chisolm and Jack Horne as they began to diminish, adopting the appearance of men once more.

He caught McDunn by his ear. Gave him a sweet whisper.

“You go on crawling back to Bogue now, y’hear? You tell him what happened. You _beg_ him to come on back here and teach us a lesson. You want to do that, don’t you? Gonna get us good. I can see the eager mean in you. You wanna show us the strength your boss has but you don’t. But you gotta beg for it, little man, on your _hands and knees_ , little man, with your tongue wagging. Lick his boots. Call his name sweet. _Tell me_ that’s what you know you gotta do.”

McDunn’s mouth twisted as if he’d tasted something fetid. “I gotta do it,” he said, churlish.

Faraday slapped his back. “Your master’s waiting,” he said, and they watched until the two of them disappeared over the hillside, riding at a punishing pace.

“He’s going to hate you all the more now,” Vasquez commented, although he didn’t sound as if he cared one way or another.

“Yeah,” said Faraday, “I’m sure that’ll come back to bite me in the ass. But some things, you just gotta do.”

“Also, it’s funny,” Billy said, wiping a knife as long as his forearm clean of its viscera with what looked like Goodnight’s best handkerchief.

“It is that,” Faraday agreed.

With that, they turned to the empty town. Corpses were strewn across posts and benches, hanging like haggard dolls. “Where is everybody?” Vasquez wondered.

“Think we killed ‘em all.”

But they hadn’t. Though they came slow, the people of Rose Creek did come: faces wan and drawn, limbs brittle and eyes hard, the same way a butcher looks on their first kill and knows it won’t be the last time blood spills on his table. They milled into the streets. They looked on their saviors. In Faraday’s opinion, they’d made one hell of a first impression.

Red Harvest spat on the ground.

“Charming,” said Goodnight. “I sense things are about to go as well as we can expect.”

 

**xxxiii.**

 

Goodnight wasn’t wrong, a fact he was loath to let them forget.

But they only lost about twenty of the promised sixty men, so really, they all agreed, it could have gone much worse. The remaining folk—farmers and women and children, hardly the stuff of a fighting force—at least had the grace of their grit.

Only one dared to clear his throat and ask, “If you’re all here… What need do we have to fight at all? Can’t you just—take care of things?” He was an anxious sort, his hand clutching his young boy’s shoulder in a vice-like grip.

“Someone’s got to bait the trap,” Faraday said. Admittedly, not his finest hour; this was not a town in the mood for his bleak humor. That may have been when discussions soured, but Faraday would take it to the grave that any man who asked another to fight his fight was not someone who deserved the resulting prize, anyhow.

Vasquez looked on the father and son differently, though. “You wouldn’t take up arms for the only home your son has ever known?” he asked gently. “Not all battles are won with guns and legends.”

The father stared at him, throat convulsing. “I’m all he has,” he said. “In all this good world.”

“Not all,” said Vasquez. “We’ve come to give you a chance.”

 

**xxxiv.**

 

They ate their fill of plenty of beans that night, though Faraday would’ve been pleased to have some mutton or pork or beef besides. Still, the biscuits were crumbly and sweetened with kernels of corn, and the few greens parsed out across the plates had been fried in bacon fat. He couldn’t rightly complain, although the people remained wary, watching them in the midst of an unnatural hush that shrouded the saloon. It made every scrape of his fork against the tin sound three times as loud.

“Don’t know about you lot,” Faraday said after the prickling stares reached his skin, “but I’m starting to feel like I oughta charge.”

“Fame is a sarcophagus,” intoned Goodnight.

“Christ, you are a biblical son of a bitch,” said Faraday.

“The good book is only concerned with one tomb,” Horne told them. “The internment of His blessed son.”

“All that matters is the grave we walk through day to day,” Goodnight said, staring through his glass of amber-hued bourbon as if it held a thousand answers.

“Sure,” said Faraday.

Red Harvest dropped his untouched plate onto the table top with a clatter. He hissed at it in his tongue, and Faraday would’ve bet good money half of the noise was cursing. 

“What’d he say?” Horne asked Sam Chisolm, and it seemed less about interest and more of a shy, awestruck sort of regard. He’d been looking on Red Harvest like that for the last day, Faraday realized, like maybe the kid had pulled the moon out of his ear.

Sam Chisolm looked at Red Harvest and then Horne. He pointed his fork at Goodnight. “He’s of a mind that this grim bibliophile either needs to drink more or drink less, with that kind of talk.”

Rolling his eyes, Goodnight pushed his chair back onto its hind legs and tipped his hat low over his face. “Pardon me for having realistic expectations for how this mad venture will end.”

“Wouldn’t have thought you’d need to worry about that sort of thing,” said Faraday.

“Is that what you thought,” Goodnight said.

“I don’t know what you’re all worried about,” Vasquez said, swallowing what looked like an apple-sized lump of food in one go. He’d tucked into his dinner like he wasn’t getting another one. “Let him send fifty men. A hundred. We are equipped for it.”

“We don’t all have guns that never need reloading,” said Faraday, with more envy than he’d meant to demonstrate. “Though if there’s a trick to it, I wish you’d teach us.”

Vasquez tutted and lifted one of his guns from the table, shaking the barrel at him. “What can I say, _güero_? There is an art to it, a peculiar sort. Though I will tell you how I did it and then you may try.”

“Oh go on,” said Goodnight. “This, I want to hear.”

“Well, you see,” said Vasquez, “I _asked_ them.”

They all stared at him. He spread his arms and shrugged, amusement curling his mouth in a sort of pleasant, distracting way that made Faraday’s tongue stuck.

“Horseshit,” said Billy.

“Now, I believe he is telling the actual God-honest truth,” Horne said, bean juice in his craggily beard. “Though I cannot readily explain the logic behind it. It’s in all ways astonishing.”

“That is a word for it,” Vasquez said with cheer. He deftly stroked the grooves where the bullets fit. “One day, I have guns with only so many bullets. It is a hard life, sometimes. I ride into a town—I cross the wrong man. He comes with many more men, twenty more men. I only have twelve bullets to my name, don’t I?”

“For shame, outlaw,” said Goodnight, cracking a smile. His poor mood seemed to be lifting.

“So I am crouching behind a water barrel and my life, it is flashing before my eyes, too short,” Vasquez said, flourishing his pair of guns again. “And I say to my beauties, to my darlings, _oh_ to have more time. To have one more bullet. But of course, these are the expected thoughts of a man walking dead. But then, I am thinking—surely, what is one more bullet? Such a little thing. A fragment of alloys and powder.”

“Oh sure, that’s all,” said Faraday.

“And they are soft on me,” added Vasquez, fondly. “What would it be worth, I ask them. And my darlings, glinting in the sun, they say, _But we are ready to rest. Weary, weary of bristling and exploding._ Of course, I understand this. I tell them, I will make you a deal. For every bullet you give me, I will give you one day of rest.”

Even Sam Chisolm was listening now, an intense curiosity in his countenance.

In the silence that stretched, Faraday shifted. “That’s it?” he asked.

Vasquez raised an eyebrow at him. “Yes?”

“You just asked them. And now you get endless bullets. In exchange for… days of Sabbath?”

“One day,” Vasquez said, “I will have to lay them down. When there are only the days left that they may rest. But for now, we ride together. I am watched and granted protection.” 

“ _Jee_ -sus,” said Faraday, drinking deeply.

 

**xxxv.**

 

It did not go as planned.

Now, that wasn’t the God’s honest truth. They freed the indentured miners—and it was sure something, watching Goodnight aim with his rifle and take out men at a distance that ought to have been insurmountable—and those men had been ground up and ridden hard. They were more scarecrow than flesh and bone. Watery, pink eyes and black teeth. Fingernails worn down to a thin crescent. Men who’d earned what peace might be left to them.

Faraday felt so sick on seeing ‘em, he even gave up Teddy Q’s prized rotgut to the pack. Let them have it. Have _something_ left.

“ _Madre de dios_ ,” Vasquez said quietly. He crossed himself and got down from his horse to see to the walking wounded.

“Forget the land,” Faraday said, staring after him as he bent to an old crippled man and peeled a soggy bandage from his skull. It was stained yellow with pus and eggplant purple with days’ old blood. “These people’ve seen the lower levels of hell.”

“Some of ‘em might have chosen it, at first,” said Sam Chisolm. “But you aren’t wrong. You aren’t wrong.”

“Men go underground only when there’s nothing left for them above it,” Horne said.

It did not take long, or much, to convince the men who could yet hold a weapon to fight. If for nothing else, they didn’t seem to know what to do with their freedom. There were dynamite stores aplenty, too, which cheered Faraday up something awful. Unfortunately, Faraday soon realized, that was the only thing that would go their way in the whole damned week.

 

**xxxvi.**

 

“Knives,” said Billy. “There’s nothing to it.”

The ragtag farmers and miners looked at him all moon-eyed and open-mouthed. 

Billy hefted his blades. “In a gunfight, this is your best friend,” he instructed them. “You can run out of bullets. When that happens, you get in close. You strike forcefully. Slash. Stab. Broadside, backward, doesn’t matter. The pain and blood loss will disorient them even if you don’t manage to kill them.”

He gave an example and gutted one of their sandbag-headed mannequins. The grains showered in a steady stream, flattening the canvas. A little more flare than he needed—but then, Billy believed it was worth doing anything with some of that.

“Questions?” he asked.

The farmer in hunter green said, “You’ve got to be joking.”

“Why would I be joking?”

“How the hell are we going to learn that? We’re not any of us… like you.” The farmer looked at his knives, then his hair. He made a face that Billy was well-acquainted with and it had little to do with the knives, that was certain. “Hell, you’re not even a _tall tale_ ,” he said, “are you?”

Billy broke his nose.

 

**xxxvii.**

 

“I can understand the pitchforks,” Faraday said. “But why did you bring a rolling pin?”

“I didn’t have a pitchfork,” the man said.

Faraday stared at him. “Hit yourself in the face with it,” he said.

(He wasn’t actually expecting that one to _work_.)

 

**xxxviii.**

 

Three hours and not a single one of them had hit a goddamned thing. Not even as an accident. Not even a _nick_. Every mannequin was more alive than the sons of bitches facing them off. The mannequins had _staying power_.

Goodnight wiped his mouth with this back of his hand. The sun was slung low, but the heat had gotten into him and sweat soaked his neck. “Y’all are starting to piss me off,” he said, stalking behind the line-up of men crouched behind the straw bales. Not a single one could hold a weapon with respect; the barrels were dug into the ground, some slung over shoulders, and others still held like fire pokers.

“How many times I got to tell you,” he said, rage curdling the words, “to keep your foot up underneath you? That the recoil is not to be shunned, it’s to be _absorbed_. Teddy—you disappoint me most, you truly do.”

“Sir, it’s been a long day,” Teddy said, strained.

“I send you off like this, it’ll be the last one you get to enjoy,” Goodnight said. “You trying to make me angry?”

“No, sir.”

“My _Lord_ ,” said Goodnight, turf squeaking up behind his soles. He turned a tight corner and paced behind them again. “You cut the ears off a mule, don’t make him a horse. So my daddy always said and here you are, proving the old bastard right. Do you—I’m trying to _help you_ , you understand?”

“Sir, we just—”

“Keep the target at your line of sight. Pull the trigger _slow_. So slow. You can’t pull it slow enough! Pull the trigger at the right time, you kill a man and the three generations that follow him.”

He halted, pulse ratcheting up in his ears, every part of him thrumming. “All right now. Fire when ready.” He watched them take aim, watched the way they shrunk from the gun and couldn’t see anything but sand and wood and straw in their targets, couldn’t even _imagine_ the grisly reality of the killing. “Fire!” he snapped, because none of that mattered if they couldn’t even _hit_ the target.

The closest bullet kicked up a tuft of grass four feet from its mannequin.

Goodnight snapped.

“I’m looking at a line of dead men. You _gotta hate_ what you’re _firing at_! Hate it! Or the first Blackstone you fell will be your last, because he will hold your life hostage as long as you draw breath—he will find you in your kitchens, in your dreams, in your children’s mouths. _Come on_!” He kicked the nearest straw bale. 

“Goody,” said Billy, at too much of a distance to register. It barely glanced off of Goodnight’s field of awareness.

He slammed his boot into the straw bale again, sending the nearest man scattering in dismay. “Goddamn sons of bitches! Get some gravel in you craw—if you don’t decide who dies, it will come for you, and it will be _indiscriminate_ —”

(It saw him then. Its feathers brushed his cheek, its shadow turned lazily to his location. He knew its coming. He knew.)

Goodnight heaved for breath. He couldn’t see the men or the mannequins or the setting sun or even Billy, dear as he was, pushing through the crowd to get to him.

“I have to go,” he said, the words strange to hear aloud. Surely that wasn’t his voice, but Horne’s. He turned and then he left the townspeople there. They didn’t know it, but they were already dead men. The only thing left was to bury them.

 

**xxxix.**

 

Sam found him at the riverside, tucked into the trunk of a honey locust tree that had been split open by some lightning strike from God Himself. He might not have found him at all if it weren’t for Goodnight’s polished boots sticking out from the withered bark. Two bits of leisure in a landscape that knew little.

When he got near enough to see into the hollow, Goodnight only looked back at him with red-rimmed eyes and a ghost-like countenance. Sam did not say a thing. He didn’t have to. He only needed to wait.

“I know the stories they tell,” said Goodnight, and Sam had always known him to be a haunted man, but never this distraught. “Pale Rider. Angel of Death. Heart Stopper. As if I have any say in the stopping of a heart. I did the once and I’ve paid for it ever since, Sam.”

“Sure, you told me that story before.”

“I can’t control it,” he said. “It comes on me like a dizzy spell. Like a sickness. You brought me here to be your ace in the hole, but Sam, I am going to get these good people killed. You know that, don’t you?”

The water was musical in its movements, trickling from rock to rock. Sam let the melody lull him and give some peace to his heart. “I don’t know a thing,” he said at last. 

Goodnight exhaled and rested his head against a knot of wood.

“I wish nobody ever said my Name,” he finally said. “I wish I’d died on those fields.”

“Don’t,” said Sam. “Because I count it as my good fortune to have known you, Goodnight Robicheaux, and to call you my brother. You don’t want to kill anyone, then don’t. I didn’t call you out here for a gruesome parlor trick. Didn’t even call you ‘cause you can shoot better than any man I know. I just wanted you here,” he said, “in case it was my last tale.”

“You think this could be the one?”

“I think I’m about to close the circle that Bogue printed on me,” said Sam, touching the raised skin beneath his neckerchief. 

Goodnight’s grief had no need for further words. The last of the light cast a bronze veil over the river, masking its internal workings. The wind off of it was already cold. They remained there until the stars grew bright enough to guide their way again, the swollen moon hung like a lantern over Rose Creek.

 

**xli.**

 

They stood at the edge of the burnt meadows surrounding the town. New dawn, new day, or so Sam Chisolm hoped. It was not the start they had anticipated, but only fools put all of their money down on a single hand.

“We don’t have much,” he said.

“We have nothing,” Vasquez corrected. “If I’m not wrong, Sam, we barely have bodies and they’re only ready to line up for slaughter. There may be a cow or two, if we spend coin.”

“Not nothing,” Goodnight said, gesturing across the width of the town. “We have a chance to put up one hellish fight if we are smart. There’s only one way in and that’s the valley road.”

“Pin ‘em in there,” Sam agreed. “Cut off the way. Control the route, lay it with traps.”

“We can come up with a few surprises,” said Billy. “But it’s still a box of death.”

“So melt the elements with fervent heat,” Horne said, surprising them all with his eagerness. “Like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Sure,” said Faraday. “If you mean let’s rig it all to blow, that was going to be my suggestion.”

“That’s a start. They’re all starts.” Sam turned to him, passing along his flask with an ease and comradery that had been earned, even if he didn’t care to say as much. “We’re concentrating too much on what we don’t have. But what we do have, we brought with us. We have what Emma Cullen sought us out for.”

“I _tried_ to teach them how to stab someone,” Billy told Goodnight, just loud enough to be heard.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” said Sam.

(It was, he had to admit to himself, the kind of story that would be impossible to tell—not a soul would ever believe it happened. But it _would_ happen. He hoped.)

 

**xlii.**

 

In Sacramento, in a beautiful white estate surrounded by electric lights, in a room beset by mahogany wood and green velvet settees and a mosaic glass lamp, in front of the eyes of the twitchy Sheriff and the cold, resourceful Denali—whose wild-snared hair was streaked with white on account of terrifying himself at every mirror he came across—Duane McDunn fell at last to his knees before Bartholomew Bogue.

“What are you doing,” said Bogue.

McDunn reached for his boot. He curled his hands around it, saliva gathering in the pockets of his cheek.

He lowered his head.

(An hour later, he had lost three teeth and half of his tongue, but not his life. The very oxygen soured on Bogue’s furious, labored breathing, stealing what pleasure there was in taking it into his lungs. But they rode on Rose Creek and they’d be riding with an army, and Joshua Faraday would pay in kind.)

 

**xliii.**

 

They had rotations of folk cleaning out the weapons and taking inventory in the hotel. It was a smooth operation—and it was Emma who ran it.

She paced across the floorboards, listening to them argue and scheme, hunched like old men over their maps. “Lot of open space,” Faraday was saying for not the first time. “Never have too much space if there’s a chance you’ll need to cross it.”

“Not much choice. We can’t keep him out, so we’ve got to let him in.”

“Make this into a graveyard,” said Horne, marking off a thick perimeter around the town. “Cut off the way for the survivors who run the gauntlet intact. The town can pick ‘em off like they’re canaries in a cage.”

“If they can manage even that,” Goodnight said. “Faraday, can you _tell_ them not to miss?”

“I can tell them to aim true and light a fire under their asses, but I can’t make up for dismal talent,” said Faraday, puffing his cigarette. “I mean, shit.”

“The trenches should go here,” Horne was saying, almost to himself. “The dynamite—” 

“Keep me far away from that,” said Billy.

Sam Chisolm shook his head. “Need you in town. You’re a close-range fighter and the people will need some protection. Vasquez, you’re with him—at the church.”

“Hmm.”

“Goody, I’ll need you to keep eyes on Bogue. If he doesn’t die, this is for nothing.”

Emma glanced at Goodnight, then away. She wouldn’t say anything, but she knew what her own job would be in this venture. Anywhere Bogue would go, she would follow. Unraveling her braid, she combed her fingers through the thick curls.

“If all of it fails, and we go out on a truly mad tale, we blow the mine.”

“What good will that do?” Emma asked, curious.

Sam Chisolm shrugged. “Not much. But I’ll be damned if he gets to walk away and have his gold, too.”

 

**xliv.**

 

Preparations were well on their way when Sam Chisolm called him to heel. Faraday went, mostly out of curiosity, and it might have been for the same reason that Vasquez followed behind. Maybe. Maybe not.

It wasn’t a hardship, anyhow. Faraday had gotten used to his company, overly loud and delighted as it often was.

“Faraday,” said Sam Chisolm, waiting for him in the middle of the valley road beside the church ruins. “Why don’t you see what you can do about getting us some cover?” The meaning was not immediately apparent—Faraday first went for Ethel, then realized there was little to aim at—but as he considered the request at length, its meaning became apparent.

He squinted out at the husk of the land. “Gonna take some work,” he said dubiously.

“I have the faith.”

“Can’t work somethin’ out of nothin’ even so. Get some of the townspeople out there—water the ground. Heavy saturation. Marshy, even.”

Vasquez looked between them, back and forth. His brow was furrowed. “We can do that,” he said, even as he obviously had no idea why it was necessary. “But what will you do?”

It wasn’t something he’d tried before, so Faraday wasn’t entirely certain himself. “You heard Mr. Sam Chisolm,” he said. “I’m going to see about getting us some cover.”

With that, he went to talk to Teddy Q. Farmhand as he was, he’d have some seeds left for the next harvest. Faraday felt a little bad for taking them off his hands, but it was a small price to pay for this town they so loved—and what the town needed now was a barricade.

The people came out in droves and covered the hills that hugged the town in a semicircle. They came with buckets, with watering cans, with pitchers of water. The spouts chugged, the town lining up to refill before heading out and dousing the burnt remnants. The soil grew black and full. At last, it could drink no more. Puddles sprung and welled from the earth, and the men and women and their toddling children came back in with muddied hems and trousers, boots encased in a thick crust of muck. They gathered, all of them, to watch under the high noon sun.

At the far edge of the fields, Red Harvest finished scattering seed at its perimeter in a thick line. There were a few seeds left; he lifted his cupped hand and chewed on them, perched on his horse. Faraday nodded his thanks and trusted he’d see it. He seemed to see just about everything, that one.

He wasn’t—nervous. But there was certainly a flush of anticipation, a jittering of nerves beneath his skin. Faraday looked at Vasquez, who was watching him still with that unbridled curiosity, mud up to his knees because of course he’d been out there with the rest of them, dumping buckets of water at Faraday’s direction. Faraday couldn’t look on him long, though. Had to cough.

Well, even if it didn’t work, this farce was worth the effort. No man liked crossing a veritable lagoon. It was not a comforting thought, except it did help.

“Okay. A little silence, hear?” Faraday called out to the shifting crowd. He grimaced at the soppy mess but got right into it, boots squelching. He crouched, balancing carefully forward on one knee, and put his hand against that ground all ripe for the growing. Closed his eyes. Took a few deep breaths.

And from deep inside, he _pulled_ his words.

“Hello, darlin’s. You might well have noticed a change in the wind—might be feelin’ a little swimmy. I am sorry for that, but you see, you’ll have a need of all this _cool, beautiful, sweet water_ soon enough.” He could feel that immeasurable sense of something taking notice of him—something listening. “Need you to get all tall all quick-like, see. Need you to take the stand again.”

And oh, they did not want to do that. He could feel the resistance like a drag, like something had gone to deadweight in his hands.

But Faraday took his time. He breathed and found the words with care.

“I know,” he said, “you been scarred. A man did you an awful. And it’s an easy and understandable thing, to be afraid of putting yourself out there again for more hurting. So much easier to stay quiet and cloaked in the dark. To protect what’s left of you.”

He said, pulling harder, “But he will raze you again if you stay where you are. Just when you feel safe again. Just when you can’t help but reach out. And this is _your land_ , ain’t it? This is your home. You can feel that breeze, can’t you? Don’t you want it to rifle through you again and bring the pollen from the east? Don’t you want to drink heavy from the rain, cold and bracing? Don’t you want to _grow_ , taller and taller, until your roots become buttresses as thick as handspans, until you _can’t be moved_? Until you’re a tower?”

“Can’t you feel that sunshine?” he asked, and knew Vasquez was gazing on him. It was like a brand against his shoulder blades, cherry red. “ _Warm and bright and sweet as a kiss you weren’t expecting to land_.”

(Between his fingers, around his wrist, something delicate and prickly began to grow.)

“That’s it,” said Faraday, heady with it. “So beautiful, honey. So good and so ready to sing, I can feel it in you. Taller now, you hear? _Taller_ , so tall you blot out the sun, tall as you can get.”

(There was a burst of noise behind him: people gasping, a murmur that swept across the town. Something curled around his ear and pressed in around his flanks. The soil was dry. The soil was firm.)

“Drink deep,” he said. “Stand strong. And these good folk and their children—and their children’s children—will care for you all the long days of their lives.”

When his words weren’t needed any longer, Faraday swayed. He felt exhausted all of a sudden—spent of breath and energy. But he opened his eyes and was startled because he hadn’t known exactly what to expect, hadn’t believed in anything more than what he could feel under his hand. 

But there they were: the fields spread out around him, blanketed in a hardy wall of long grass as high as his chest. Maybe even higher. The gold caught against the light and fanned out proudly. It was so dense that he wasn’t certain it was penetrable, and bordered by corn stalks twice his size, swollen with ears of corn that could easily feed a family each.

Faraday had no words now. He stared at the fruit of his labor and marveled. That was not a thing he knew he could do.

Vasquez came up beside him and reached out to run his hand through the grasses. He curled a fistful together and it felt more like he was holding something inside of Faraday instead. “That,” he said soft-like, “was good work, _güero_.”

“Yeah,” he said, still dumbstruck.

“Not just out there,” said Vasquez, nudging him. Faraday turned at his following gesture and found himself face to face with the townspeople, and sure enough there was something changed in them—something steadier. Steel and grit. Wonder and hope.

Then Vasquez said, with more than a little speculation, “Do you think you could speak to the trees?”

“Shit,” said Faraday. “Reckon I can charm anything.”

 

**xlv.**

 

With the first mode of defense in place, the rest came together over the following two days at a quick pace. They split the townspeople between themselves into seven groups: Sam’s took to filling sandbags and preparing the wagon barriers to block off portions of the town; Horne’s dug deep into the grassy knolls to create trenches and covered them in thatched roofing; Goodnight continued training the best shots of the farmers, his shouts echoing over the busywork; Faraday’s laid the groundwork for the dynamite; and Billy and Vasquez worked at reinforcing the church. They covered the holes in the walls with planks an inch apart, just wide enough to allow for sight and a good shot. The pews were dismantled and reused to build it as close to a fortress as they could, and with a strong rafter beam and enough helping hands, the bell tower was reconstructed into both a beacon of hope and a sniper’s nest.

In the school room, the children painted pinwheels candy red.

In the middle of all the bustle, Sam went to Red Harvest, who on account of the townspeople’s fear remained in their periphery instead of in their midst. He found him in the patches of yucca and agave, separating the fibers from their leaves to weave into string.

“Can I send you to scout for us?” he asked in the Comanche language, or near enough that.

Red Harvest peeled a long fiber from the leaf he’d gutted on the rock before him. He considered Sam at some length, then shrugged.

“I said a week, but we may not get even that,” Sam said.

Considering the horizon, Red Harvest gathered his bounty. “I’ll ride northwest,” he said, or near enough that. “Return. With their day of coming.”

“If you’ve got any tricks to slow them down…”

Red Harvest smiled, secretive and anticipatory. He made a gesture that Sam could not catalogue—he had learned the words but never the signs—and his horse, milling at the fence, ambled on over. “Will you be ready?” he asked, mounting her.

Sam cast his gaze to the church. Revived the town may be, but they lacked every advantage. 

“We’ll have to be,” he said.

 

**xlvi.**

 

The trees that Faraday had grown up taller, stronger, and thicker were being cut down and lugged into the churchyard trunk by trunk. The air was thick with sawdust, almost a paste that caught in the back of his throat. He perched on the fence of the undertaker’s yard, nursing his fingers, which were sore from all the fiddling he’d done with the strings as they’d laid dynamite. He ought to have spent his break in the saloon, quenching his thirst. Or entertaining the beautiful woman with green eyes and pointed lashes who remained in town and had a lingering eye on him.

He wasn’t at either of those attractive options. Instead, he was watching the sawing, the sanding, the racket of nails pounded into wood. 

No, not even that—he was watching Vasquez.

He was unable to help himself: it was the light caught in the billowing white shirtsleeves that Vasquez had long freed as he sanded down the roughshod planks; the medallion, a talisman calling attention to the hollow of his throat; and the matter of his skin, sunburnt and darkening, stretched fine over bones that seemed more mortal than not. There was a terrible thirst in Faraday. He felt parched, as if too long without water. 

If he took those half dozen steps between them—if he fit his hands over Vasquez’s hips, felt the shift and pull of muscle, the strength in him—what next? Faraday had no stories like that one. He didn’t know where it could lead.

But if he could get his damn hands under the shirt that was hiding all of Vasquez’s contours, maybe Faraday could rid himself of this itch. Rib to rib, the belly, the sternum, the slight give over a man’s heart where the bone was plate thin. His skin would be hot from the work. His lungs, taking and releasing. Faraday wasn’t sure that’d be enough, though. His very teeth ached with a need, tenuous and ill-defined. He wanted to inhale beneath Vasquez’s ear to see if it would stain with color.

Vasquez saw him looking. “What?” he asked, hand hooked on his hip. He scowled at Faraday. “ _Güero_ , if you insist on staying around, you could at least help.”

“Hate to get in the way of your good-doing,” Faraday said, more peaceably than he felt.

“Lies. You love to get in the way.”

“You got me painted the wrong color.”

“As if I don’t know you,” said Vasquez, huffing.

He felt a peculiar stirring in his belly. “Think you know me, hombre?”

Vasquez studied him as he set one of the fractured pews against the wall of the church—he was always moving, Vasquez was—and maybe there was something to that sentiment because Faraday sure felt like he knew what Vasquez was thinking. He wasn’t generous with Faraday, but neither did he take him at surface value. “I think we’re on that road,” he finally said. He offered Faraday the hammer that had swung so carelessly at his belt.

Faraday slid off the fence and took a few steps back. “If you think I’m any good with that, you don’t know me at all,” he said, mild-like. It was a lie. He didn’t feel mild at all.

He left him to the work and the wondering.

 

**xlvii.**

 

That night, Faraday drank too much.

He knew it was a bad idea and he did it anyway. The town was surrounded by a specter-like field of tents, pitched white canvas studded into the earth and near hidden by Faraday’s fields. He couldn’t look on them and on the church, lovingly recrafted, without thinking on what was to come. He felt a strange sinking in his stomach that tasted like mortality. He was thinking on death, unwisely.

He was thinking on Vasquez, too, and that had to stop or come to fruition—one or the other. Nothing in between was acceptable.

So he drank too much, too fast. He knew he had when he wobbled standing from his chair, face tight and hot, vision blurred. He had his gun—he was pointing it in a haphazard line. “Did I introduce you to my wife?” Faraday asked, feeling half-crazed. “Her name is Ethel, and I love her.”

“Hello, Ethel,” said Goodnight, amused. “Charmed.”

“And I consider her to be the love—the love of my life,” said Faraday. “She is a no-bullshitter, a straight shooter—sweet as sin, though—if you amount to a hill of beans. Full of _rules_. I don’ know why I like her so.”

He looked at Vasquez.

“All right, calm down, now,” Horne said softly. “Put the gun away, son.”

“Hey. Her name is _Ethel_ ,” Faraday told him. “And you’ll show her some goddamn respect.”

Horne raised both his palms in the air.

Faraday had a passing stray thought—a pinch of madness—that whispered _just shoot them all_. But it passed. It always did. It was the drink. It wasn’t good for him, some days.

He pulled out his second gun. “It’s Maria you can disrespect,” he said in stage-whisper, wagging her like a fish.

Vasquez burst out laughing. He laughed so hard, he about spat out his food.

And didn’t that make Faraday’s chest go tight and warm. He crested that wave, rode it out, delighted in it. “Don’t tell Ethel about Maria!” he cried. “I’ve entrusted all o’ you with a sacred—sacred honor—”

“Not right, how you talk about women and guns and—not the same at all,” Horne said in dismay. “Now, Faraday…”

“What about you?” Faraday demanded of Vasquez, swaying too close. “Your… your two beautiful ladies there, gleamin’ silver. You laid a name on them?”

Vasquez touched his chest, pushed him back. His eyes were bright with mirth. The smile on him was lazy and roguish, more suited to Faraday than to his fancy. “I have.”

“And?”

“You assume they are _ladies_ and not Marias.”

“Hell, any man’d be lucky to have three Marias under his roof,” said Faraday.

Vasquez pushed him back again. This time, he didn’t lift his hand; it remained a molten heat to Faraday’s sternum, as if he were embedding a painless brand to his skin. “And Ethel?”

Faraday thought he might have some flecks of color in those dark eyes. Something he had to get a closer look at. Something that called to him, much as Vasquez did. “Ethel,” he said, stumbling over the name, distracted. “Well, reckon I’d clean up for Ethel. Marias just make for a good story, don’t they?”

“Do they,” said Vasquez, and there was no humor in him now. He held Faraday’s gaze with a strange weight, lips parted. The space between them was an isolated canyon given over to the elements: charged, lifting the hair on Faraday’s arms. That weight was anticipation, trepidation. He leaned in closer, the chair creaking under his palm.

“Faraday, don’t,” Billy said.

And like that, it was gone. 

_The drink’s bad for you, fool,_ thought Faraday, reeling back. _What are you doing? What are you_ doing _?_

He crammed Ethel and Maria into their holsters and stormed from the room. He didn’t look back. If Vasquez was wearing any face at all, it wasn’t one Faraday was in any mood to see.

 

**xlviii.**

 

On Sabbath, they lifted the church bell back into its home on a pulley.

The entire town gathered to watch. It was amazing the things that brought the spirit high, Vasquez thought, gritting his teeth and giving one last haul on the rope. From up in the tower, he could hear Billy and Teddy Q grunting, fixing the bell back to the rafter that would anchor it. Sweat trickled down his spine. When the rope had slack, he let it drop to the dusty floor. He felt Faraday’s appraisal but ignored him. There were bruises sunk under Faraday’s eyes that told of a brittle night, and Vasquez had no desire to be bitten by a wounded animal.

He already feared he was too late to stop the momentum they’d already created. Last night, if he’d—but last night was already gone. There was no use in drawing it apart and examining how it had fit together.

Teddy Q rang the bell. It was a deep, full, resounding sound that shook the floor and rearranged Vasquez’s heartbeat into something more complimentary.

The people erupted in a cheer. It was difficult to resist feeling cheered himself at that. At his foundation, Vasquez was a Good Samaritan. There was nothing quite like the sensation of having done a good turn. He crossed himself and kissed his hand, and then made a face at the gritty texture of it.

“Now you can pray for us, Father,” he told the Preacher.

“I will pray for you until I forget how to pray,” Preacher said with more sincerity than Vasquez expected. It earned him a real grin, and all his teeth.

“It is a fine place,” Horne said, idling up to him. “Many prayers were born in these walls. They will outlast all else. It is a comfort, sometimes, that we leave behind not only flesh and blood, but a standing example of our capacity to love.”

Preacher looked between them. “Do you have faith?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“No reason my story can’t walk hand in hand with His,” Horne said. “We’re all His children, or we were once.” 

Vasquez shrugged. “My mother would have killed me if I believed otherwise,” he said. “But also, I agree. It is a comfort, sometimes, that there will always be something with greater abilities than ours to set a path.” He paused, shading his eyes with the flat of his hand. “Is that Red Harvest?”

It was.

Red Harvest came at a gallop and did not slow until he reached the churchyard and Sam Chisolm’s side, his mare’s flanks glistening from a disciplined ride. He swung from her back and landed with no imprint in the soil. His words to Sam Chisolm were terse, and even if Vasquez didn’t speak the language, some part of him already knew their meaning.

“What did he say?” Faraday asked. 

“Bogue comes with his men,” said Sam Chisolm. “He’ll be here at dawn.”

 

**xlix.**

 

That night, they ate and drank and laughed uproariously with the grim merriment of men facing death. If the stories fell a little careless and the raunchy jokes a little flat, no one spoke of it. Billy knew these kinds of nights well—traveling west was no small feat and he hadn’t always had Goodnight’s protection by association—afterwards, there had been the threat of Goodnight himself—and the atmosphere always carried a sense of being charged. The scent of lightening before it struck. Sparked flint.

Still, it affected him more than he’d admit to. And it was certainly affecting Goodnight, who had gone from falsely genial and drunk to morose and two sheets to the wind as the evening progressed. Billy recognized the signs: the way he stared out into a void of his making, the twitchiness at every movement in his field of vision. _Not tonight_ , Billy found himself thinking, spirits laid low. _We got here and we were so close. Not tonight._

But of course, it never worked that way. The next time Billy got up to fetch a round of liquor from the bar, Goodnight followed close at his back. 

“It’s comin’ for us,” he whispered into Billy’s shoulder.

Billy closed his eyes for a long moment.

“Nothing’s coming for us,” he said after, squeezing Goodnight’s shoulder. “We’re doing okay. Hold steady—not much longer now.”

“No no no,” Goodnight said, or maybe it was one long moan butchered into syllables. “I heard the owl, Billy. It’s flowing low and fast tonight on that windfall. I heard it off in that dark and it was too close. It knows I’m here and it means to put me back on the hills of the damned.”

“You didn’t hear anything, Goody,” Billy said, softer than was deserved. He’d been here before. They’d done this dance.

“Billy, you have to go,” said Goodnight. “You have to go from here. Far, far off.”

“You’re working yourself up,” Billy told him. “There’s no place to go. We’re promised here, Goody, and you know it.” The weak and sallow light in the saloon reflected itself in the bottles behind the bar counter, and in that resonance, Billy saw something in Goodnight’s eyes slowly dying with it. He pushed another shot across to him, but the damage was near done.

“I won’t be able to control it. I can feel it laying across me—smotherin’ me—fillin’ up my throat and head, Billy, and I can’t stop it.”

“Don’t say it unless you want to make it so,” Billy said sharply.

Goodnight clasped his face, his arms. He pulled Billy in so close that his breath was like felt across Billy’s cheek, soaked in bourbon. “All these people,” he moaned. “But the shadow’s found me. It’s creepin’ across the fields and caught onto our scent and its _hunger_ drives it on through the golden meadowed dreamscape. It’ll be on us tomorrow, Billy. Please tell me we’ll go. We can get ahead of it. We can escape while there’s time. Save all these good people. Save you.”

He felt a horrible helplessness whenever Goodnight was seized like this. “There isn’t any shadow, Goody. There’s only—there’s only you.”

It was a truth he hated to release to air. Each time, it was an arrow that found its mark.

Goodnight’s breathing hitched. His clumsy hands kneaded at Billy’s waist, under his arms. “I won’t let it have you,” he whispered, the same oath he’d mouthed into Billy’s spine the first night and every night since.

Billy closed his eyes. He clasped the back of Goodnight’s head and knocked their foreheads together. He said, “Don’t let it have any of us, okay?”

“I can’t control it.” Goodnight’s face pinched and his eyes were glassy with tears. “I’m a—I’m a yellow-bellied coward, Billy, a killer and a cur. I’m everything I hate. I deserve this, I do. For what I did in the war, for what I did to that boy, I deserve this come down on me. It’s a curse. I can’t control it. I wish I could.”

“You have to,” said Billy. “Please. For me.”

Then he took his hand. He led him up the stairs to their room. This was a storm only the two of them could weather.

Billy was used to knowing he might be dead by morning.

 

**l.**

 

The people of Rose Creek gathered in front of the church, candles cupped in their hands. Preacher led them in prayer. It was not a prayer that they had heard before: more story than lesson, more omen than promise. It rose in their ranks as if it had its own legs, living and strong, ready for the long day to come. 

They were not one of the people, but they came out from dinner to listen anyhow and to grow tall on that prayer. The air had gone cool and stirred the dirt. Sam Chisolm took deep, bracing breaths. He watched the bobbing lights in front of the church and marveled that this was not the story that would last—a trembling spirit of will holding vigil in the dark—the kind of faith that once had buoyed his heart before the uncertainties and injustice of the world tempered it.

But he remembered that feeling. He picked it up and polished it off and there was still a shine on it.

Horne stirred behind him. “That’s a nice prayer,” he said.

“If there was ever a time to make good with your maker…” said Faraday, trailing off. He took out his cigarettes and contemplated them. 

“Where’s Goody and Billy?” Sam asked.

“They went upstairs,” said Vasquez with a mildness that they all understood. “Your friend can’t hold his liquor.”

“He’s got a large burden to overcome,” Sam said. “Lucky enough to have someone to help him with that. He’s a different man than when I saw him last.”

Then he looked on them all: their faces streaked in sweat and grime, the readiness that marked each of them like a stone, these men that had followed Sam to a corner that wasn’t even theirs to protect. They all had their own burdens, he thought, but they’d come anyway. They meant to see it through even though the possibility of death was as close as it’d ever been. Not even a tall tale had secured immortality.

“Anybody wants to leave, now’s the time,” Sam said. “Won’t hold any ill will toward you. Won’t try to change your mind. You’ve done all I’ve asked of you and more.”

They glanced between each other and Sam already knew their answer. Still, it would be a boon to hear.

Vasquez was the first, and somehow Sam knew that would be the way. “I have nowhere else to go, so I’m in,” he said, hunched in on himself as if even he didn’t believe the lie. Then he said, too, with more sincerity, “I could not leave these people in their time of need.”

Sam smiled at him.

Faraday pulled out a cigarette but only twisted it around in between his fingers. “Even _if_ you weren’t holding my horse hostage,” he said, “I’ve got a reputation to protect. I’d be stupid to turn down this whopper of a story. I’m gonna be the goddamn hero.”

“ _Güero_ ,” Vasquez said, exasperated.

“What?”

“I already knew,” Horne said, throat pinched by erosion and time and such things, “tomorrow was going to be a dark day. And now that it’s upon us and I see these good people ready to fall under our watch, it’s a little darker. But to be in the service of others, with men I _respect_ like you all…” He lifted his head, dark eyes gone quiet, the gray faded from his beard; in twilight’s veil he was for one moment as young and without shame as he’d been those long years before he’d traveled the Colorado River.

Faraday clasped his shoulder.

Horne smiled. “Well. I shouldn’t have to ask for more than that.”

The feeling of it sat like a hot stone in Sam’s belly. He let it give him strength, same as the prayer. They would have need of that soon enough and their preparations were not yet through.

Red Harvest sighed and thunked his head against the doorframe supporting his weight. “I’m hungry,” he said.

They turned to him, slowly, as one.

“You little shit,” said Horne, marveling.

 

**li.**

 

Turned out, Red Harvest speaking English was better than a parlor trick and twice as funny. Faraday about burst at the seams he’d laughed so hard at Horne’s affront and Vasquez’s askance expression. “I thought you were a _child_ ,” Vasquez protested, horrified, after Red Harvest noted he’d be fairly deaf to not pick up white man’s language after a few generations of their general calamity.

Red Harvest looked pained. “Yes. I know.”

“ _Mierda_ ,” Vasquez said. He palmed his face.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Horne told Red Harvest. “I think we all have questions.”

“Not me,” said Vasquez, waving them off. “Well, questions, yes—but I need to take one last look at the perimeters. I don’t trust Bogue to keep to a duel at dawn.”

“He is the kind to slither in at night and cut your throat,” Faraday agreed.

“No need to worry about that,” Sam Chisolm said. He took the steps with heavy thumps, removing his hat from his head. “I’ll keep watch tonight.”

“That so?” Faraday asked, skeptical. 

Of course, he’d forgotten for a moment who he was talking to.

Sam Chisolm looked to the heavens. “Think I’ll take a walk.”

And he cracked his neck, and hunched his spindly back, and grew and grew and grew.

Faraday watched the long figure of him elongate and warp, ascending to the sky in such a manner that it seemed natural, like a fella stretching his shoulders. Form fell away, as did meaning, the amalgamation of a man mere construct and easily discarded. He went out as well as over, spreading as watered ink. It took some time, but only, he sensed, because there was some pleasure in the leisure. Then it was done and Sam Chisolm veiled the town in an early evenfall.

“The Lord as a creator is most ponderous,” Horne said in his creaky voice.

“He most certainly is,” said Faraday, but his attention was already shifting form, as well. Beneath the enforced gloaming, he saw the ghostly white of Vasquez’s shirt catch on moonlight as he disappeared into the fields surrounding Rose Creek, apparently set to his task despite Sam Chisolm’s assurances and now overreaching presence. The state of Faraday’s life was such that it could have just as easily been a spirit taking flight. But he knew Vasquez as something close to faith and believed where he might otherwise not that his company wouldn’t be spurned.

“Ask those questions for me,” he told Horne, lifting from his seat, and left him to it.

An opening in the field left no doubt as to where to go. He followed. Out into the grasses. Out into a silence as still as water with no wind to stir it.

Vasquez had come to a stop in front of one of the makeshift trenches. His fingers trailed over the teeth of a poppy-red pinwheel, unmoving under Sam Chisolm’s watch.

“Come tomorrow, you might be Named,” Faraday remarked.

Vasquez shrugged. It probably didn’t matter to him, which would never cease to baffle Faraday. “Might be dead, too.”

Faraday hooked his fingers in his belt and craned his neck up at the not-sky. “Nah. You? Got a lot of mileage left in you, I reckon. Ain’t no tall tale ever gave up early in its roots. It’ll carry you through the storms. ‘Til you go too far. Get too complacent. Too big for your boots and all that.”

“Like you, _güero_?”

“Yeah,” said Faraday, “like me.”

Vasquez had been walking to him even before he started to speak, the grass so thick he had to work for each step. He framed Faraday’s face with his hands. It was wholly unexpected, and Faraday forgot what his lungs were meant for.

“Are you afraid?” Vasquez asked.

The last sun could’ve been behind him and Faraday wouldn’t know fear. Not when there was this. He thought about death, but it only brought a rueful sort of resignation and, on its heels, the determination to see Vasquez’s solemn expression return to its typical humor. “I am not,” he said, most sincere.

“Not of the battle. Of—”

“I am not,” Faraday said again, and he kissed Vasquez hard, with such momentum that his hat was knocked askew and tumbled down his back. It was in all ways a strange kind of kiss for Faraday—unused as he was to the taste of tobacco in another man’s mouth and the abrasion of stubble—but he found that he did like it. He liked the fistful Vasquez took of his shirt; he liked the weight of Vasquez’s arm around his neck, hooking him in as if he’d any intention of runnin’ tail. Putting his mitts on Vasquez’s body in all the ways he’d pondered—that was a thing he liked, too.

Vasquez had a dip in the small of his back. He relished in using his teeth. There was a knotted lump between two of his ribs and he squirmed when Faraday pressed his fingers against it, grousing. Turned out, there was plenty more to like.

He kissed him so long, it got to be painful. Each time Vasquez exhaled against his lips, it was too sensitive, too raw. He’d stroke Faraday’s throat, his chest, his arms. Just exploring, really. “Handsy,” Faraday breathed into the heat of his mouth, the word graveled.

Vasquez reared back enough to give him an incredulous look. 

Given where his hands were, Faraday could admit there was some hypocrisy to that. He gentled a kiss, gave it a lasting impression. He could feel the second when Vasquez _gave_ , relaxing his weight against Faraday and closing his eyes. “That’s it,” Faraday murmured; he had no need to put any persuasion behind it. “Gonna let me give you a proper send-off, troublemaker?”

“Proper? You?”

“I have been known to gift a not-insubstantial amount of gratification to my lovers,” said Faraday loftily. “I am, you might even say, a connoisseur of earthly pleasures. A master of the proper send-off, so to speak.”

Vasquez snorted.

“You sound like a horse when you do that,” said Faraday.

“Oh yes, I am feeling the gratification already. Tell me more about how I sound like a horse.”

Caught somewhat flat-footed, Faraday reconsidered the direction the conversation was taking. It was, he had to admit, not his typical pre-bedding tactic. “I just think,” he said slowly, “that tomorrow feels a long way away. Long nights are best not spent in thought, and I am itchin’ something fierce to have you say my name in somethin’ other than mockery.”

“Ah,” said Vasquez, and he softened. “Like this?”

He put his mouth to Faraday’s ear and said his given name, as if it’d been caught deep in him and at last escaped on this breath.

Something in Faraday quaked. 

Vasquez kissed him again: forehead, mouth, chin, all benedictions that could be taken to heart. He said his name again. And again. And again.

In the end the only way to stop him from taking apart the very air, the very stuff Faraday needed to keep on his feet, was to wrap around his body and bear him to the earth. The grass flattened beneath them and Vasquez landed with a grunt, probably right on top of his hat. Faraday didn’t give him an opportunity to grouse—put his mouth right on him—got the high ground. Maybe he’d expected a fight, but Vasquez rolled their bodies flush together, belt clattering to belt, and he grabbed to Faraday’s back as if for dear life. 

The night was newborn and Faraday would not let him sleep a lick of it.

At some oft-forgotten hour, still shaking with fine movements beneath him, Vasquez made a hot, fuzzy noise of wonder in Faraday’s ear. “I can see the stars through Sam’s heart,” he said.


	6. the battle of rose creek and the ride of faraday (a name is an easy thing to take)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is so late! Been struggling to fix an issue I noticed a bit too late out the door. But I think it's all good now, and I really hope you enjoy the final chapter. I can't thank everyone enough for their kind comments and for coming along on this wild ride (and your patience as I totally fail to make deadline).
> 
> For those who were curious what kind of tale, exactly, Vasquez is: I promise you Faraday gives you a plain and accurate answer without meaning to in this chapter. But that, and his history, I kept deliberately semi-shrouded for you to fill in with your own wild wonderings.

**Chapter Six: the battle of rose creek and the ride of faraday (a name is an easy thing to take)**

 

**lii.**

 

Under the weathered stars and Sam Chisolm’s cathedral of a ribcage, Vasquez slept. Faraday’s breath as it pulled like the tide against his temple was slow and even, spiced with liquor. It followed him even into his dreams.

He dreamt about Fly Rookery. He dreamt about the ranger.

The cloying smell of iron and sawdust overtook him first. He was in the cellar under the barn. The doors were wide open; light spilled down the rickety steps and into the haunted space below, kissing the tip of Vasquez’s boot. It was a beautiful, full-flowered orange light that made promises. He lifted his head.

At last, he could see what his ears and heart had known for some time: the shivery thing shackled to the table was only what was left of the child. The other—the widow’s son, his ears like large crimped seashells—was almost indiscernible from the remnants of the cattle. Despite the horrors renewed sight held, there was something approaching beautiful about the stillness of the dust motes caught in the late sun. This was a place to store sentimental belongings that were never intended to leave the dark. But Vasquez was neither sentimental nor a belonging. He lived. Someone was screaming in the barn, bringing down dust from the eaves like a fine-grained rainfall, and she, too, lived. He may be able to keep it that way.

He raised from the wreckage of his skin. The chains were gone. The door was open.

His gun, a battered old friend, still hung from a peg split into a weight-bearing wall alongside trinkets of a similar nature. He could reach her now. He would take her out of this place, and when the ranger was dead, he would take all the rest of them out of this place, too. There were still ways to be free.

The noise only blotted out as Vasquez ascended the stairs, the soles of his feet naked and cracked against the planks. He was aware that he was dreaming—the world ribbed inward in tunnel vision until only the cellar and the stairs and the ethereal embrace of the light existed—not even the ranger was beyond, not even the inevitable violence. There was a way out. Vasquez was going to take it.

As a boy, the wind had called him out into the world. Every way was a door. Every door was a choice.

In the barn, Faraday was waiting for him at the top of the steps. “You can’t run from a name,” he said, sun brassy and gold in his hair and along his arms. “You just carry it with you, sweetheart. Even now, it’s on your back.”

“It’s heavier than it looks,” said Vasquez, and woke. 

 

**liii.**

 

They rung the bell at dawn.

It was a call to arms. It was a signal to the army verging on the southern hills that they were awake and waiting. It was the defiant song of a people tired of being tread upon. It set into Emma’s teeth. She visited Matthew for what may very well be the final time and wondered whether anyone would be left to bury her at his side if she died. Her tears came hot and fast. But then the bell began to toll. 

That wildfire thing in her began to burn too bright for the tears. They all dried up in its wake. She felt like a composite of impossible things fighting for space: too few gaps remained for anything other than one breath, then the next.

She looked on Matthew’s cross. Pressed a kiss to her fingers and her fingers to his name. Time would weather it away, but she’d never forget.

“Look on me from time to time,” Emma said. “Not often. Not long. But just enough that I feel your love at my back and can remember the strength you plaited into it, and me, for the days ahead.”

The cloven earth of his grave caked the front of her dress and elbows. She didn’t bother to brush it from the linen; let it be a flag. Bogue had once said, in one of his few truths, _This is what you love, what you’d die for._ Not for the land. Not for the promise of what it may become. But for the dear things they had already placed into its safe recesses, which waited for their company on some fine evening with no rain.

Emma picked up the rifle and went into town. In it, Sam Chisolm was shrinking back into his own skin, wincing at the sunshine as if he had a bad hangover. “Fine morning,” he said.

 

**liv.**

 

Bogue’s men lined the southern hills like a long line of ants: black mounds on a black day. They stretched the entire length of the valley. Although Rose Creek had perked up in his absence, his presence brought it low again, and the townspeople felt the ache as they walked and tasted nothing but rot in the air. He was still caking their teeth. Lining their lungs. They were drowning in his standing water.

The last toil of the bell hollowed out and went to ground. But Sam hoped the townspeople felt that, too. Let it shake ‘em. Let it hold ‘em fast.

He listened to the whistling wind: the women and children sniffling under the floorboards of the shop, Emma and the good folks lining the balconies and hiding behind doorways, the creaky wagon barricades trembling on their wheels in anticipation, Red Harvest perched bird-like on the rooftops, Billy and Goodnight nested together thick as thieves in the bell tower, the men in the trenches resigned to burying themselves yet with breath and pumping blood. _All is right with the world_ , he thought.

Let it be so.

A great shout went up from the Blackstones and the first line galloped forward to meet them. They struggled through the thick line of corn stalks around the perimeter of the fields, losing some of their momentum—but come to meet them they did. Sam had no moonlight to aid him. He worked at his worst in the light of day. But work, he could yet do.

“Go on,” said Faraday at his side. “Scare the bejesus outta them boys.”

“I do aim to,” Sam said.

He walked, and then he walked faster. He picked up speed as he plunged into the grasses then the wind was rushing past his ears as he spilled out and unhinged his jaw and swept over the initial siege.

He snapped his teeth down with relish.

 

**lv.**

 

Years later, they would say the battle of Rose Creek was such that it could hardly be contained in one story. The stuff of legends, some said. The stuff of nightmares, said others. When Sam Chisolm swallowed the battlefield, it was not a death of the flesh—Sam Chisolm had no taste for _people_ , their bagged organs, their vein-swollen ankles—but the madness that enveloped them struck deep and raked across their gray brain matter. They fell in a wave: clutching their faces, weeping piteously, tumbling from the saddle in desperation. They would wander the landscape in the weeks after, waking up from some awful sleep of character and sense.

Was it better than death? It would depend entirely on whom you asked. 

They _would_ say that was only the beginning.

Sam Chisolm cracked his neck, pulled back into shape, and looked across that expanse. He lifted his hand and beckoned.

Bogue felt an unfamiliar quake in his soul at that crook of fingers and nails. Danger itched like sweat behind his ears. He gritted his teeth, jerked his chin, and sent a battalion on its way with McDunn riding center. “A one-trick pony,” he announced to calm the men’s jitters, their sudden doubt of ability. “A dirty lowdown trick. I’ll give him that. But there’s nothing on this good earth that can’t be killed by a bullet to the brain.”

At his flank, Denali shifted, too. But his was not a shift of nerves—his way was not to be afraid of anything but himself.

“Patience,” said Bogue. “Let the chaff do their work first.”

 

**lvi.**

 

The next wave made it to the canopy tents hidden sweetly beneath a carpet of wheat spikes heavy with kernels. The men lying in wait there had rope that Faraday had easily convinced to never give and never break. They pulled those ropes taunt and unseated half of the men, then dragged them into their tents for the slaughter.

For every tent without a farmer to man it, there was yet something _else_ there, a shadow that moved like Red Harvest but made no sound and flushed with no blood. It could carve, though, and it could petrify.

Those Blackstones who made it through the gauntlet set their sights on the town proper. They did not see the small pinwheels spin at the coming fury of horseshoes leaving their stamps in the soil. They did not see the trenches dug so deep that a host of men could be cradled by them, where they could cradle their guns in turn. These were men used to being underground. These were men who had broken gears and missing limbs, who thought it might be a fine thing to burst out into the open world once again—like a new birth, like a groundhog on spring’s hem.

Horne had said, “I’ll wait with them. I will go because I look on them and feel dreadful ashamed. I chose my isolation and my quiet dark tomb. They did not, until I shook myself free and we came for them. I will wait with them.”

As the first horse swept past the belt of pinwheels, Horne punched the plunger down into the detonator box to launch the spark. The hills were studded with purses stuffed with dynamite. The charges went off—a thundering blast filled the air above them—the shrieking of horses and men given metamorphosis into a composite creature.

It took out a third of the entourage, but not near all. They’d known that, too. 

“Now we rise,” said Horne. “Now we are the warrior angels, sent to defend this blessed garden from the snake. We are like song! On the wall! On the wall!”

The miners rose. They hooked their rifles on the edge of the dirt. They fired.

The dynamite was gone, but Horne didn’t hold with too much of the stuff, anyhow. He shot one Blackstone after another; when his bullets were gone, he heaved his bulk over the trench wall and onto the field, hatchet in hand. He remembered this as if from a dream: the killing of men, the ease of it. Where his hatchet sunk, flesh sighed and fell away from it, and yet others Horne lifted into the air and sent flying with his strength.

There were still too many. He heard the miners dying behind him, punctured cleanly by bullets better aimed than their own, and he stomped his way through the buzzing howl of death—the sort only mortals could manufacture—each footstep shaking the ground beneath them.

When he found a good place to get a grip, Horne dug his fingers into the turf.

He strained.

He lifted the earth like it was a carpet and shook it out.

 

**lvii.**

 

Bogue could not rightly tell what he was looking at, not at first.

The field itself seemed to grow taut. Then its surface rippled and rolled out like a wave. He had an impression of violent churning; the wave rushed outward toward his remaining men and culminated at their feet in a shower of dirt and pebbles. For an instant before it flattened again, Bogue caught sight of the underworld beneath: the specters of albino roots dangling in midair, the squirming earthworms grown pink and fat, and sugar-spun sprouts clouded in clumps.

Those on the surface fared much worse. His Blackstones and hired hands cried out in terror and tumbled from their horses, which dove to their knees much the same. Some cracked their skulls on their way down. Others ran, cowardly, forgetting the money he’d promised them.

Bogue clenched his reins in his hands until the leather squeaked. He felt, not for the first time, his own oiliness, a sort of unpleasant slick that pooled in places he couldn’t reach. It had always been enough to wiggle free of trouble before. It would be again.

He should have brought more men. Braver men. Men who _hated_ and carried it in them like an albatross. But then again, it was so much easier to buy weak men and a good gun.

“Send me,” said Denali. “I will bring these giants down at the knees.”

“Don’t disappoint me,” Bogue said.

Then he sent the last of his expendable hired hands out to their deaths. Let the legends of yesterday give him a good show. Bogue, as ever, played the long game to win.

 

**lviii.**

 

Denali, it was said amongst the Blackstones, amongst the people with whom Bogue broke bread, was a man caught in a waking nightmare. His fear was such that he brought it with him into every room. If one wasn’t careful, he would drag you into his sleeping, too. It only took one lingering stare. One misstep. One quickened breath.

Bogue found him wandering the desert on his bare feet, eyes dull and hair tangled and gone sheer white from his temples down. He did not ask for water, but drank. He was not interested in food, but ate. His pupils were blown to full darkness, leaving no whites to his eyes and no way to read his intentions. His own reflection startled and terrified him. From the moment Bogue laid eyes on him, he knew Denali was traveling in a world that no one could see. The way must be harrowing.

But oh, could he murder like a songbird: effortless, lightly, perfection. All of these were qualities that Bogue sorely could use in a right-hand man.

“You’ll see all manner of awful things with me,” he said to Denali. “You’ll do things more awful than can be seen, too. But it’ll still be nothing compared to that nightmare, won’t it? Consider it—a holiday. Paid in full.”

Denali cared not for money; there was no relief to be gained. But following instructions was the closest sensation to relief he could find, and Bogue indeed made the waking world out of his reach as close as possible to the one he was trapped in, and there was some relief in the idea that perhaps he wasn’t so far between as he imagined.

(They said if Denali got his claws in you, he could drag you into his nightmare. You’d hear the dead horses ninny. You’d smell the soil gone to acrid coal dust. Every peach would taste like ash, and every river would well like a burst blister. If Denali brought you with him, you’d always hear the child you’d never have sobbing desperately for your comfort, separated by a distance you couldn’t ever hope to walk.)

But walk, Denali did.

 

**lix.**

 

The first of the Blackstones flew into town as if it might hold some respite from the unholy hillsides and the devils encountered there.

Unfortunately for them, burning wagons rolled into place and shut the way behind them. And it turned out, most of the devils were still waiting. It wasn’t even a tall tale who shot first, but Emma Cullen from her relatively secure placing on the second-floor balcony of the saloon. Her aim was perfect. She had plenty of motivation, Faraday figured, but it still gave him something of a pleasurable shiver to watch.

“Stay alive, won’t you?” Vasquez asked Faraday, as they crouched in the safety of the church, watching through the slats in the walls. He didn’t look at him, but he made that an order.

“Don’t jinx it,” said Faraday. He squeezed the back of Vasquez’s neck and slipped away. There’d be a need for a man moving on the ground, much like Sam Chisolm was, keeping those desperate bastards on their toes.

He could’ve sworn that there was someone walking alongside him as he ducked behind the undertaker’s workshop—a fleeting impression in the corner of his eyes that wore Red Harvest’s face and carried his knife. “Come to keep me company?” Faraday asked, amused. He unsheathed Ethel and Marie from their holsters and snapped back the safeties with his thumbs. They were his good girls—always had been.

“Great,” he said, as if he’d gotten anything like an answer. “Let’s go kill some people.”

 

**lx.**

 

They said Joshua Faraday must have talked his guns into one hell of a firefight that day. He took those bastards down like paper targets at the fair, rarely pausing in his dauntless pursuit. He worked the town like it was his home ground. He whispered on the wind to the cowards at heart: _Be strong, be brave, for your sweetheart, for your little ‘un, for the old hunting dog who’d never make the trip away. Backs straight. Line of sight straight. No hesitation. Do your dead fathers proud. Do your mothers the favor of living._

He whispered to their adversaries, too: _You never wanted to be here, did you? All this death, all this blood money, an awful business—for awful men—but you ain’t awful, are you? You could walk away, boy. You could turn tail and your God will thank you. Go on, bunny rabbit, quivering in your boots, go on. You run, and you kill your own if they take issue with you._

And some, they did.

They said, too, that the terror gave them all reason enough to run. Sam Chisolm strode along every road, through every building, some dark and enormous appendage growing behind him and inking out the sky. His eyes were the end of the universe. His breath was made with too many lungs behind it. He would kill you dead, but it didn’t feel like much of an ending was in wait. It got so that he only had to lift a hand and a Blackstone might decide eating his own barrel was the better alternative.

On the periphery, here and there and everywhere, Red Harvest, all the thin slices of him and the real one as sprightly and clever as could be, felled men in spades. He was on the rooftop spit-roasting hired gunmen with a single long arrow. He was under the porches, reaching out with an insidious twist of lighting to slice at a man’s Achilles heel. He was in the corners were the sun couldn’t deny his presence. He wore many faces—he remembered all of them from the wars long ago. And maybe his story wasn’t one to be understood by the white men, but they talked about it after, anyhow, the Red Harvest who could be one hundred men split like wool yarn.

They said, too, that the church was the fort. It was held well. Dashing from wall to wall, Vasquez aimed, shot, and killed as many as his endless supply of bullets could allow. He felt the sun hot on his face despite the lack of it in the church, as if its touch burnt him. He couldn’t see Faraday in the chaos outside, but he knew he was there and could hear the echoes of his voice every so often. _Be strong_ , he said. _Keep fighting. Watch out now! Stay alive and I’ll give you somethin’ to talk about._

“I’m trying,” muttered Vasquez, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. He set his hat down beside him respectfully and got back to work.

(Don’t forget about Emma Cullen, they said, too. Don’t forget how fearless she took to the job. How she pushed her people to the brink and kept pushing. How her fury rose up inside of her and set like cooled steel. Her aim was improving. Her death toll grew on stilts. She forgot to be careful there on that balcony and stood at her full height as she tended her town.)

And Goodnight Robicheaux took out his rifle for the first time since the war. He’d carried it with him all this time, unable to part from it out of equal shares terror and fondness, but its flint was never struck and the bolt had near gone. It only took a spit and polish, though, and it was as good as new. He settled up in that bell tower with Billy and wasn’t certain he could put it to use again.

Then Billy touched his back and said, “Goody. Did you bring the good stuff?”

They said Goodnight laughed, but they would never know the joy in him, the insurrection of feelings that rippled out like a stone in a lake. “Never a good idea to drink before a battle.”

“The entire last week has redefined how much alcohol I need in my life,” said Billy, a little put out.

“Is that so?”

“Will you buy me a drink after this or not?”

“Now see here,” said Goodnight, warming to him immensely. He wished he had the kind of time to show it. “I will buy you all the drinks you deserve if we live to nightfall. Buying you a drink is still the best decision I believe I’ve ever made. God’s honest truth.”

“Then until tonight, your flask will have to do.”

Goodnight fished his flask out of his vest and pressed it into Billy’s hand. He caught his dark eyes, so steadfast and forthright, and thought, _I’d give this one endless sheets of poetry if I thought he’d enjoy it at all._

“Oh. They’ve broken through,” Billy commented, as casual as if he were observing the weather. He took a shallow gulp from the flask.

And Goodnight took aim, gently squeezed the trigger, and picked up his mantle once again.

 

**lxi.**

 

Denali needed no horse, which was fortunate because no horse would carry him. He padded through the death and destruction as if it could not touch him. He’d never heard of Jack Horne—he had no need of tall tales in a reality that was far too real to bear, most days—but he recognized a kindred soul. They’d both dwelled in places man had willfully forgotten in the hope that doing so would vanish them.

They were men waiting on death to give them some peace, and Denali decided he’d give Jack Horne what he sought. At least one of them should discover the truth of it all.

Horne had two corpses strung over his back, which made him a fine shield as he hacked into a third. He looked up at Denali’s approach. His features were too small for such a large figure. “My Lord,” he said, “you look as if you’ve seen the devil hisself. As if evil had perched on your neck and made itself a collar.”

“I have not yet seen enough,” said Denali, and lunged.

His knife sunk into Horne like he was river clay, gray and smooth and damp. Horne cried out in more surprise than pain. He clasped Denali’s hand, but his strength did not match Denali’s momentum as he pulled the blade upward through Horne’s belly. Blood spilled like hot wax between them. It smelled like something that had lived too long in a body.

“Do you want to see,” Denali asked him, almost gently.

Horne, skin blotchy and gone white, struggled to look at him. His eyes were rolling in his skull.

Denali pressed his hand behind his neck, bringing them closer. He knew Horne could see it—could hear it—could taste it, when he spasmed and fought to free himself. The chaos faded to choked whimpers around them, the sky blackening to an ochre tower. It would be a new thing, Denali thought with stirred interest, to have company on this road of a different, more endurable nature. Perhaps even—

The arrow struck him cleanly through his heart.

Denali stumbled back. He blinked several times—it hurt, and he knew he had not blinked for many years. When his vision cleared, he looked to the north and there stood Red Harvest of the Comanche, ever-young. He wore the colors of a promised war and his hair was bristled and cared for. His eyes were clear and strong.

Red Harvest hooked his bow over one shoulder, favoring his best knife for the killing blow. “Denali,” he called in their tongue, signing with his blade. “You shame me and sorrow me. I see you’re lost. This is not the path meant for you.”

“You have killed me,” said Denali, fingering the wound. Between them, Horne was sunk to his knees, heaving as if the air was leaving him too fast. Denali envied him the pleasure of breathing at all.

“I have killed something,” Red Harvest agreed.

The nightmare was disintegrating around him. The color of the skies lightened and found purchase in a magnificent blue, and for the first time since childhood Denali could taste the clean puncture of the wind. The baby’s cries stayed with him, the methodical clop of the dead horse, too—but as Denali lifted his face to catch on the breeze, they seemed far away and tinny and almost sweet for their memory.

His cheeks were wet. His hands trembled.

Red Harvest cupped the back of his skull. “Wake up,” he said, and slid his knife across Denali’s throat.

(This was not a story that survived the lean, furtive centuries. But once in a while, Red Harvest would say, “And so he did.”)

 

**lxii.**

 

Horne felt the life draining out of him like it was a sure thing. A right thing. As he pinned his palm over as much of the wound as he could—it was a roping, ruptured line down his side—he wondered whether it was worth the effort. As if a haze had come and gone from him, he looked on the fields with unveiled eyes and felt poorly for his handiwork.

And besides, there was a sweet falling of light. He could see it. Maybe two miles out, nestled in the canopy of the trees. Golden and ethereal and soft, like the Lord had said, _Make your bed, and rest._

Two miles was not so much to walk. Even bleeding out, Horne could make it.

He was pondering this when Red Harvest crouched next to him and examined his condition. “You’ll live,” he said. He stripped from his vest and ripped it in twain, then again, making a long strip of its fabric.

“I do believe I have a choice,” said Horne.

Red Harvest squinted at the glen in the distance. “I won’t carry you,” he said, disgruntled. “I am heading in the other direction.”

“Do you ever imagine what it’ll be like?” Horne asked, softly, rapt. He could hear its calling. He could hear the readiness of his body to answer.

“ _That_ is yours,” said Red Harvest. “I wouldn’t presume to. My path is different. My way is, too. Once there was a boy,” he said, wrapping Horne’s torso tightly, “who was curious and headstrong. He wanted to see what would happen tomorrow. He felt that way every day. He still does.”

“Your curiosity must be insatiable,” Horne said.

“On your feet,” said Red Harvest. “North or south, you’ll still need to use them.”

Horne thought about his wife and her smooth, rounded nailbeds; running his thumb across them had felt like a luxury. He thought about his daughter who had been insatiably curious, too, and twice as clever as he was. The missing of them was a stone, but as with most stones, it had eroded over time to pinch less at his heart. 

He looked on the light one last time. Then he steadied himself against Red Harvest’s shoulder and stood, holding in his insides. “I’ll bow to the wisdom of my elders,” he said with a wheezing laugh.

 

**lxiii.**

 

His men were dying or dead, one or the other, but McDunn didn’t care. What was left of his tongue was swollen in his mouth—pus and fetid saliva pooled beneath its bulk, which felt less an appendage and more a stunted worm beyond his control or reason—the damn thing was and would always be useless at this rate. His body had never known punishment like this before. It craved days of oblivion and drink and bed.

He’d choked on booze and water aplenty since Sacramento. But he could still taste Bogue’s boot shine. The grain of wear.

His body, without respite, would have to settle for some revenge. He’d sharpened his knife on that breakneck ride back to Rose Creek, imagining, for some measure of peace, what it would be like to slice Joshua Faraday’s whore-addled godless tongue from his gullet. It would not be so powerful outside of his mouth. And then he’d be just like the rest of them—just like McDunn.

_Little man_ , he’d called him.

McDunn stumbled through the valleys of the shadow of death that was Sam Goddamn Chisolm, not caring to land a hit or not. It was his saving grace—no one took note of his creeping, assigning to him a soul on its last legs. And so it was he made his way into the fields, then into the town, and right on up the valley road where Faraday was fixing his death toll up something pretty. Faraday, all awhirl, sun flashing on his guns as if he were something out of a storybook, something in a picture.

_Little man_ , McDunn mouthed. Little men made men who kept others little.

He cupped his mouth where old blood spilled just as readily as new and staggered from under the shade of the undertaker’s workshop. The yard was studded in coffins, grave harkings of the battle at hand. It gave him enough cover—and Faraday enough pause as he tried to read his colors—to aim his pistol and shoot.

The punch of lead to Faraday’s belly sang as honied as a choir to him. 

That bullet was all he could bring to bear, though, because even as McDunn readied his aim again, a sudden clatter and bang came from behind him. He turned to heel, but it was too late—the first lead kiss puckered up and planted into his heart—the second and third sent him spinning, the sky and its blue banquet caught in the trap—the noise of it followed after as if there’d never be an end to the barrage, but McDunn was already dead, never to hit the ground.

Later, they would say: he spun like a top and fell neatly into an open coffin. If you’d have pulled his body out again, you’d have seen it already had his name etched into the base, the only mercy in his story being that Sam Chisolm ever bothered to ask his name at all.

 

**lxiv.**

 

“ _Güero_!” Vasquez hollered, heedless of the ongoing firefight around him as he ran from the safety of the church. He sped past the coffins, past the bastard’s body who at least had done them the favor of claiming one, to Faraday’s side, because of course it would be Faraday in his arrogance and infectious joy to leave himself a flag planted in the valley road for terrible men to follow.

He wouldn’t be the same tall tale—the same _man_ —if he hadn’t. Vasquez had a claim of sorts on him now, but these violent delights could only be tempered, never tamed. He knew this, but he still cursed, and he still ran with his heart in his throat.

Faraday groaned, his hat tumbled from his head. He held his gut tenderly. “Son of a bitch,” he groused, lifting to one knee as Vasquez approached. “I knew that’d come back to bite me in the ass. I knew it!”

“And you still _did it_ ,” Vasquez pointed out, more than a little cross. “How bad? Let me see—”

“None of that, I can see how much you wanna mother hen it—”

Vasquez shoved him back into the dirt.

“ _Ow_ ,” Faraday said. “That—hurt, actually.”

“ _Me vale verga_ ,” said Vasquez.

Faraday squinted up at him. “I don’t know what you just said, but let’s go with, ‘Let me help you up and we can take cover in the church.’”

“Close enough.”

“Neat.”

Vasquez could not hide his smile’s brief appearance. He lowered himself and pulled Faraday’s arm to stretch over his shoulders. “Come on, _güerito_ ,” he murmured, taken by a sudden gratefulness. He would put Faraday in the church. He would provide them the cover. The sudden quiet was an ill balm; it could only mean another wave would soon push their way past the defenses. “Next time, maybe you will leave well enough alone, eh?”

Faraday gave him his weight as he wobbled to his feet. “When I got such good backup?”

“You’ve been shot.”

“Only a little.” Faraday grinned, crow’s feet crinkling like paper. He planted a wet kiss on Vasquez’s cheek that was neither dignified nor unwelcome. “My hero.”

“Don’t call me that,” Vasquez said, pained.

“Well, if the boot fits—”

Vasquez was going to belt him again, but he had barely reared back when a shock traveled up his spine and a sickly feeling slithered desperately into his stomach to hide. It was not unlike a vast shadow crossing over a midday sun, but he saw no imprint and felt no shade. The world simply hollowed out into a concave resemblance of itself. An immense pressure fell hard on his back.

 _Something’s coming_ , he thought, aimless in his panic. Whatever his instincts already knew, he could not put a name to it.

Faraday’s eyes were wide and milked of green. He was looking up over Vasquez’s shoulder. He was looking at the bell tower.

“Everybody, get out of the open!” Billy’s scream ripped through the streets. “They’ve got a _goddamn Gatling gun!_ ”

Vasquez would remember this moment: how quiet the world could go before an abrupt change of fate.

It came. It came like hail, puncturing the land and the buildings and the survivors and the corpses. Dirt and blood sprayed up in surprised, alarmed tufts at Vasquez’s feet. He tottered back with a cry.

It sounded like a hail of bullets, and it sounded like talons sinking in.

 

**lxv.**

 

He felt it coming. He’d forgotten in the sudden renewed joy of doing a job well—of doing it side by side with Billy—that to pile enough death at their feet was to tempt the beast. He had lost himself in the strange, breakneck pleasure of not having to think beyond one adjustment of the barrel to the next. Next to him, Billy grunted and made noises for every miss and match. Just letting Goodnight know he was there. That they were together in it. Not on the hills of the southern cities, but in this cramped makeshift bell tower, elbow to elbow, close enough that they’d wear the same recoil scars at its end.

Goodnight could think of worse ways to go. And perhaps that was the thought which did him in. He couldn’t know—he never did.

“That’s what being a tale is?” Billy shouted, referring presumably to Sam Chisolm’s presence on below: a harrowing, meandering shape difficult to look on. He was picking off the trapped Blackstones from one end, Red Harvest from the other. “ _That’s_ what you want me as?”

“Now see here,” Goodnight had said, peering down his scope at the distant figure of Bogue, whose forces were dwindling to nigh manageable numbers at long last. Enough so that he had some hope, for the first, of victory. “I am a tale as tall as Sam Chisolm and you have never seen me out of my own socks, much less my appendages and physical form. Chickens of different feathers lay the same size of eggs.”

Billy laughed roughshod over the gunfire. “You’ve never set foot in a chicken coop, Goody.”

“You are goddamn right I haven’t.”

Lord, he was destined for hellfire, matching Billy’s wild gleeful bearing of teeth with his own. And although Goodnight had always been hypervigilant of the owl’s bearing and speed—although he often saw it careening toward him for days on end, and these past few days had been no different—this once, he didn’t expect it to catch up. He honest to God believed they would escape its wingspan. He wouldn’t have been persuaded to stay if he hadn’t.

But it came as a trickle of feathers across his cheek. A lift of hairs along his arms. A rising screech in his bones, in his blood, in the back of his throat.

The owl. The owl, upon them all.

Goodnight froze. He couldn’t move a muscle. He couldn’t tug even his trigger finger, set in stone where it rested. Horror converged so fiercely into his soul that it stoppered his esophagus and barricaded sound from reaching his ear drums. He could taste the death before it came, welling up from him out of the pit, an awful and inescapable certainty. If he aimed his sight on the hillsides where Bogue’s men perched, he might’ve seen the instrument of its choice, but he didn’t need to—he simply knew.

The cold would be on their necks. All it’d take was a touch.

Billy knew. He only had to take one glance at Goodnight’s face and he knew. His eyes went wide and dark, and he lowered his gun. He said something, but Goodnight didn’t hear it.

_You’ve killed him,_ Goodnight thought. _You’ve killed them all. But that’ll be the one that matters. That’ll be the one that finally steadies the pistol in your hand when you point it at your temple._

“Goody,” Billy said. That’s what he was saying: a name. “Goody, tell me.”

“The Devil’s breath,” whispered Goodnight.

Billy sucked in his own, tearing up over the side of the bell tower into the unsafe open void. “Everybody, get out of the open!” he screamed. “They’ve got a _goddamn Gatling gun_!”

The owl fell over the town. And where it raked, the dead tumbled after. He knew this special hell, this torturous instrument—had heard it on the battleground often enough to place it on the shelf of his nightmares—the oddly mechanical and industrial pattern of it, as if he were in one of the northern factories listening to tin being stamped out for soup cans. Goodnight wailed, hands up over his ears and into his hair, compacting in on himself. There was no stopping it—the damned shade was out.

He’d told Billy. He’d told him, they had to go. But they hadn’t.

They hadn’t and these good folks were dying.

The Blackstones were dying.

Their friends were dying.

All the world was dying.

(He was a young man. He was on a hill longing for home. Someone gave him a gun and said, _Careful. It’s heavier than it looks._ )

 

**lxvi.**

 

Emma cried out and threw herself into the burlap sacks providing their cover. She hadn’t been using them. She was glad for them now. The shower of bullets whistled overhead as birds might, shattering the windows of the saloon. They embedded in splintered wood. They found homes in Joseph Marbatose’s eye socket. Three times in kindly Old Pecker’s hips, chained like a belt.

It was deafening. It was a death rattle.

And she knew, too, it was a force at work beyond Bogue’s cruelty and cunning. 

There was no time for regret or fear. She pulled as many of her people into the saloon as she could, scraping her flesh raw over floorboard and nail and glass. Beneath her, around her, in all of the rooms of all of the buildings, Sam Chisolm quaked and suddenly retreated. Perhaps he’d been hit. She couldn’t know. She had no time to wonder long at it. 

It seemed to go on forever. That long and a day. And her whole body shook as if it were being wrung out, but there was something else there, too, digging into her bones and tendons and teeth until the whole of her was tightly knit and unfaltering. It was an unnatural stillness, but not an unholy one.

The Gatling gun’s echoes faded. Emma’s ears popped in its wake. She picked up her rifle and stood on steadfast feet. The town was a ringing chorus of whimpers and shrieks. They were so many of them dead, she realized. And so many with one foot in, one foot out. People she’d gone to church with. People she’d taken supper with. People who tried their best to give her comfort when Matthew was taken from her. She feared for Teddy Q, who had been down in the trenches, the only one to volunteer who had no experience beneath the earth save for his planting.

“Sam,” she said.

It took a minute yet, but something knitted and loped and _slumped_ into being behind her. “At hand,” Sam said wearily, touching her elbow. Blood spotted the boards beneath him but he did not waver.

“What’ll we do about the Gatling? We’ve no defense against it.”

He didn’t say anything at first. At last, he pulled his hat low over his eyes and told her, “I fixed you up an army, each soldier with his own purpose. A legend seeking redemption to cast a shadow as long as mine. A good man set to do good deeds, from humble origins but with a grand fate. A friend, because I can be lonely, and his keeper, because so can he. A cunning ally masked as a nightmare. And for times such as these, a Hail Mary.”

He pointed, and Emma followed the long line of his arm out to the smoking ruin of the fields. A single rider galloped madly into its embrace: a familiar hat on a familiar man on a familiar horse.

She’d never seen anything so magnificent as that.

 

**lxvii.**

 

He was bleeding dry and it was a tomfool thing to do. But Faraday prized himself on doing tomfool things. They’d barely made it through the first volley alive, folding in on each other behind the protection of the undertaker’s building, shaking like rabbits in a burrow. When the silence had at last come—a pause for counting or a reload, Faraday couldn’t tell—he’d lifted his head and there, across the valley road, Jack was waiting on him. Pawing at the ground. Dumbass horse that he was to walk into this quagmire.

But he was there for a reason, and Faraday knew it. Someone would have to stop the Gatling gun because it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Goodnight Robicheaux, the poor bastard. And Faraday, well—this was the tale he was waiting on, wasn’t it? The one that’d put his name on the map.

Funny, how suddenly he felt no hunger to have it.

“We’ll run for the church,” Vasquez breathed against him. Jesus wept—practical Vasquez, irritable and kind Vasquez, who still had to be wearing Faraday’s marks on his body. Vasquez, who pelted out into an open firefight to save him. Vasquez with his particular habits and loose humor and the scars on his ankles that promised more stories yet to share.

There really wasn’t time to exchange words. Faraday wasn’t sure what he could possibly come up with, anyway. 

So he just kissed him. He kissed him and he got up and he left.

“ _Güero_?” Vasquez called, confused. “Where are you going?”

Faraday mounted Jack, letting out a low hiss at the fire wagon that made up his insides. Having a hay day, it was.

“Hey!” Vasquez said sharply, but Faraday clicked his tongue and they were gone. On them dust devils. On that wind.

He made for the platform barely visible past the ragged meadows, the remnants of better memories. He thought maybe Vasquez was yelling after him, but the words were snatched away in the blitz of wind and the moan of Jack beneath him and the thready keeping of his own pulse. They were reloading—he could tell now, could see the small smattering of cowards helming the only real monster aside from Bogue, its master—but he could make it. Surely he could make it.

Lord, let him make it.

They saw him coming. He was not so fast as he once was—not with Jack weighty, slowing as the line between Faraday’s injury blurred and melted into every part of his story—or maybe it was meant to be that way. Not even Jack, wonder as he was, could fight a tale when it blazed on its own path. Faraday was ill-fitted to a fist fight with the stars.

He saw when the Gatling gun was reloaded. He even saw the son of a bitch who said _fire on him_ , though he didn’t hear the words. They rolled that line of lead as easily as a prize wheel at the fair.

He felt the first bullet like a sucker punch. The second went in a lot sweeter.

_I’m not going to make it,_ Faraday realized. The winding path to the platform was too long—the first of the bullet holes in Faraday had been the kicker all along, playing the long game to win, but it didn’t matter so much when a whole parade of them took up arms after. Weakness slinked in like a wounded animal and clung to his bones, his mind, his heartbeat, slowing the world around him down. Down. Down.

His gamble wasn’t going to pay off. He craned his neck, twisting in the saddle to look behind him. He wasn’t sure for what. Maybe for a sign of whether anyone was left living to take up the mantle. Maybe for Vasquez, the shape of him against the whitewash of the church’s broadside, watching him go.

What Faraday saw was not these things, but a lone figure at the edge of the fields streaked in grime and bloody business.

Red Harvest raised his arm into the sky.

When he brought it down, the sun came with it.

 

**lxviii.**

 

Darkness descended. It was as if a candle had been snuffed and there was no light to see by. The transition was so sudden, Goodnight cried out in shock like he’d been walloped by a railcar instead.

Billy couldn’t see the roads and buildings, couldn’t see Goodnight, couldn’t even see his own hand in front of his face. Somewhere below them, a thumbnail of light brought brief illumination—blinding, burning hot—as if it were seen through laced fingers and neatly covered a moment later. Then there was only the pitch black and a sense of some unfathomable emptiness careening overhead. He’d never felt such wrongness before.

But with that dark came a blessed silence on its heels. The Gatling gun needed no targets and required no vision. It was a basic tenant of gunmanship, though, to never shoot blind.

The Gatling gun stopped. 

The reprieve would be brief, but he didn’t need long. Billy found Goodnight in that harrowing nothingness and raked his fingers into that greasy hair. “Goody,” he said, pushing their foreheads together into an untidy marriage. “Goody. I’m here. Please stop this.”

“I can’t,” Goodnight said, the words more a long unbroken keen in their grief. “D’you think I wouldn’t, if I could? If I could, Billy?”

“Let it _go_. You drag this around, it really will kill us.”

“I told you,” he wept. “I told you we should leave. I felt it after my heels and it wants you so badly, Billy, because you’re a force of good for me. These people. These _people_ , they took us in and now I’ve killed them.”

He wished—he wished it could be easy. He wished he could find whatever words would be the key. But Billy knew it was like being hooked on the drink; there was no fixing to be had, only a daily struggle interlaced with highs and lows. If Goody wasn’t half as stupid romantic—if Goody could unravel the complex workings of his own brain—but to change any of that would be to change the man he’d decided to ride with. And Billy was not sure which would be worse: to let the death sit on their bedside but sleep in good company, or to put it out on the stoop and not recognize the man he’d turn to find.

Today—right now—he only needed to do one thing. Billy rocked their foreheads together, side to side. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” he said. “But I’m listening to you now. We’ll go—we can go anywhere you like. But let us _live_.”

Goodnight shook something fierce against him, his mouth working in agony. “I don’t know _how_ ,” he whispered. 

“Kindly,” said Billy. “One day at a time. Together.”

 

**lxix.**

 

Faraday needed no light. Whatever cover Red Harvest was able to provide, he had a sense it could not be controlled for long. He could not think on it without the enormity stuttering up his throat, so he leaned low over Jack, mashing his mane in his bloodied hands, and urged him onward. He knew where to go. Just had to _get_ there.

And for one impossible, dizzying, beautiful minute, he really thought they had a fighting chance. 

The cries of fear and dismay lifted into a block behind him. But in that conglomerate, he still heard Red Harvest snarl in pain—his voice lifted into a howl—and then the world was too bright, too hard, like an overexposed bulb about to explode. Faraday panted, “Let me make it—let me—let me—”

The world righted itself. It wasn’t quite steady yet, but near enough for someone on the Gatling gun platform to spot Faraday’s nearness, shout, and aim.

This lucky bullet tore straight through Faraday’s side. That’d put him at a solid four, he thought, and on its heels, _Make that a solid five._

The sun—no, it was Faraday who slipped this time. The colors whirled gentle-like around him and deposited him into the soft ground. He couldn’t feel his gun in his hand anymore. It was as if all feeling had been cut from his tendons.

(How would this story go? The last ride of Joshua Faraday, that’s what they’d call it. He took those bullets like lovers into his arms. He bequeathed his guns back to the rocks that birthed them and took only his voice to the great and final precipice. My Lord, he said to that big yawning drop, I think I have been loved.)

It was a few feet more. He could do that.

He crawled.

The gruff, dimwitted laughter of the Blackstones on the platform marked his path. The soil was compact beneath his knees and palms. Splotches of shadow cottoned over his sight, and he wasn’t sure he had enough in him to finish it. But he had to try. He pulled himself up on his knees and patted his chest, unable to feel the impact.

Found a cigarette. Found his matches, bent to hell.

(I think I really had it there, he said in wonder. I had it in my fist and didn’t have to say any words at all.)

A one-eyed Jackie-boy with an eyepatch over his dark angular eyebrows and a fair sort of mouth hopped down from the platform. He was awfully clean for such a grievous murderer. But he looked on Faraday, struggling as he was, and there was a spark of consideration that did not require much of a breath to blow into flame.

Faraday barely had the breath left for it, sure. But it was enough.

“Give us a light, sugar,” he croaked.

(It was enough.)

 

**lxx.**

 

The explosion rocked the hillsides. It took out the Gatling gun and its operators, a chunk of the landscape, and most assuredly Faraday himself. In the shock of silence that followed, Sam Chisolm had no time to mourn or fear. He threw himself into picking off the last of the hired hands that hadn’t already been mowed down by the Gatling’s traitorous kiss.

When it had gone quiet, all men dead but those who belonged otherwise, he looked to the hills again. To a handful of feathered shadows against the sun.

Bogue. 

To his left, Horne limped from the church with blood rivulets twisting down his pants, Red Harvest under his arm, his own hands blistered and raw. Goodnight and Billy clutched themselves still in the center of the passing storm, but they, too, looked down on Sam from the bell tower. And already disappearing into the fields—Vasquez. He was launching toward where Faraday had disappeared from them and Sam felt his heart nurse its bruising for a moment, the longest moment he could afford to let it, for what Vasquez would find. It wasn’t the fate either of them deserved.

He’d brought them into this, though, and all he could do now was finish the job.

Bogue descended on the town. 

Sam nodded to Goodnight, then sunk back through the door of the laundry, biding his time. He watched as Billy pressed a kiss to Goodnight’s cheekbone and drew him away from sight. Horne looked between the church and the fields he’d only recently escaped, but the sorrow was painted hard on him, and he turned to follow Vasquez’s trajectory on toddling feet with a willing Red Harvest as his crutch. They would take care of things if Sam could not, but Sam would indeed take care of things. He’d waited—so long—to do so.

He spared one more thought for Faraday. _I pray Death gives you a chance to open your mouth._

 

**lxxi.**

 

In the coming days, then the coming years, then all the lifetimes after, they would say Bartholomew Bogue walked into the town of Rose Creek with two men and a pearl-handled pistol and death dangling from his face like it’d gotten its canines sunk into his cheek. Already his face sagged and grew sallow. Already his footsteps were slow and meandering.

“In the end,” came a voice into all that bloodshed, “I didn’t even have to chase you. All I needed to do was wait and here you are, come to me.”

Sam Chisolm came out of the shadows of the laundry, his boots drumming across the wooden steps: _come to me, come to me_.

“Chisolm, I presume?” Bogue asked, sweat sliding down his jowls.

“That’s right.”

“And we are acquainted. Presumably from a time before your… Naming.”

“From a time before,” said Sam Chisolm, “and the time after. You tied your name to mine with unbreakable knots and moved westward, never knowing that I’d be drawn to follow. Couldn’t feel the weight of my body even as it grew bigger and bigger and bigger. I’ve been dragging you into a grave for half your lifetime, inch by inch.”

He ambled to Bogue as if he had all the time in the world. It was the easiness that put fear into Bogue’s brain matter, splintering all the other schemes he let fester there. Later they would say: a man who strolls to a hanging has already knotted the rope.

“And this occasion?” he asked, a discordant buzzing high in his ears.

“The fourteenth of October,” Sam Chisolm said. “1867. Lincoln, like the president. A town with a red gate at the well. A dozen homesteads wreathed in dandelions. A rogue faction of Greys still hatin’ from the war, bearing your name.”

And Bogue, they said, must have remembered something of that in all the evil he’d done. “The red gate,” he said. “Land so ripe for the taking it smelled sour.”

Sam Chisolm flicked the button on his holster and freed his gun. “A woman with a voice like running water. Her husband, a man of the book. Their children grown shy on a new world order.”

“Sheep,” breathed Bogue with all the foulness he possessed. From beneath his sleeve, that pearl-handled pistol that killed Matthew Cullen slipped into his damp palm and found a home. “Bleating at the first shadow to cross the fence. Red on the inside no matter their coat.”

Sam Chisolm shot him. He shot him right in that cowardly hateful hand.

They would say the scream that ripped from Bogue’s throat floated up and found itself repeating in the church bell—that it’d stay there for years, immersed in the tolling.

Bogue was on the dirt, but he scampered backwards and pulled himself up the church steps. He left a trail of blood behind him, kinky but unbroken. The gun hung useless in the remnants of his fingers. “Wait,” he cried brokenly. “Wait, please. Please.”

Got himself into the church. Got himself to the altar.

And behind him, Sam Chisolm with his walkin’ and his judgment. Behind him, Sam Chisolm with all the time in the world to take his vengeance. Behind him, Sam Chisolm drawing his handkerchief from his throat and those marbled, inflamed scars given a witness. Behind him, Sam Chisolm becoming more than himself, more than the church, more than the land and the moon and the shrieking promise of cold ether beyond, a clamminess that no sea, no cave, no morgue knew. He was in the rafters. He was in the walls. 

He would swallow Bogue, church and all, stars and all, before he let him pass.

“Mercy,” Bogue rasped, eyes shot and terrified. He lifted a shaking hand as if to ward the nightmare away, as if to entreaty its forgiveness. “I’ve wronged you, I—I know that now, I can see. I can see you, Sam Chisolm.”

“Mercy,” pondered Sam Chisolm. _Mercy, mercy, mercy._

“But you are a God-loving man! We can pray.” Fevered brightness had come over him like a film, too close to madness to look upon. “Pray with me, Sam Chisolm, for what I birthed in your ashes. Forgive me. Forgive my weaknesses and my spoilt spirit.”

Sam Chisolm looked on him.

“ _Pray_ ,” he said. “Yes, you will pray. _Pray to me_ , bug, for my mother and her chastity.” He swelled, fingers crunching the wooden frame of the church into plots of sawdust, the dead in him, the living. “Pray for my siSTERS, BOGUE, STRUNG UP AND FLAYED ACROSS LONG GROUND. YOU PRAY.”

“Mercy,” wept Bogue, “mercy, Lord—”

“PRAY FOR THE MONSTERS YOU MAKE, BOGUE. YOU PRAY. YOU OPEN YOUR EYES. YOU SEE THAT HOLE IN THE DARK. YOU SEE THAT LONE CANDLE. IT FLICKERS. IT WAVERS IN THE PITCH. FEEL THAT SHIVERING WARMTH, BARTHOLOMEW. FEEL THAT GREASY WICK. CUP YOUR HANDS AROUND IT, BARTHOLOMEW, AND KNOW THAT WHAT WAITS YOU IS NO PARADISE, NO HELL, NO MEMORY OF NAME OR DEED. YOU WILL FEEL THE LONG RINGING HOLLOW UNTIL YOU ARE BUILT OF IT. NO TOMB OR MAGGOT OR BOX. ONLY THE PRAYER, BARTHOLOMEW, AND A TIMELESS DARK THAT ANSWERS YOU.”

“No!” Bogue howled, an inhumane and twisted sound. He grasped for his gun, squelching into what was left of his fingers with the ones that remained unharmed, and lifted the barrel to Sam Chisolm’s great wandering eye.

(And it could have been the end of Sam Chisolm, they whispered.)

But it was not.

A shot rang out—so pure in tone that it shook the eaves—but it was not Bogue’s. 

The bullet ripped straight through Bogue’s heart, proving at last that he had one, however deficient. His body splayed across the altar, mouth agape.

Sam Chisolm trembled. He shifted. He curled into himself and grew smaller and smaller and smaller. His fury, his hunger, his hatred, his grief—all compacting to a wobble in his chin and the sheen across his kind eyes. When he was something more his shape, he turned to the door of the church.

Emma, rosen hair tangled and wild, looked on him with the same wobble and sheen. A rifle was slung in her arms as if it were a child. “Sam,” she said and nothing more.

And that, as they would say, was the story of how widow Emma Cullen shot robber baron Bartholomew Bogue in the heart at twenty paces. It would be her first story of many.

 

**lxxii.**

 

His ears were ringing from the long hour of gunfire and explosions, but the shrill pitch only grew in the subsequent silence. Vasquez was aware, in the periphery, that Sam Chisolm was pulling the rope in his trap taut, that Bogue approached the town and revenge would belong to someone with the gumption to take it, but what had once been the primary purpose of this venture was only an endnote. He didn’t care who killed Bogue. Nothing mattered more than the cough of smoke still hanging over the field where he last saw Faraday ride.

Vasquez left his friends to their duty. He dove into the grasses and went to his own.

“ _Güero_! Joshua, answer me!”

The debris was more man than machine. Bile rose in his throat; he didn’t check the limbs and leftovers because if any of them belonged to Faraday, it was too late. His boots slipped across ground matted with blood and unmoored grass. He dug his hands in and swept the soil foot by foot because Faraday’s miracle growth had survived even the dynamite’s razing, hiding the damage in its embrace.

In the end, Vasquez found his body only because the barrel of the Gatling gun had blown clean free of its trappings, largely intact. It looked as though it had shot right into Faraday—knocked him several feet from the center of the explosion—and bludgeoned his chest so hard that a visible crater was left in his sternum, sickeningly spongy to the touch.

Vasquez touched it, anyhow. He pressed his fingers in and listened for breath and felt his own coming short, labored, wounded.

Except for the trickle of red from the corner of Faraday’s mouth and a sooty ring around his face, he otherwise appeared untouched. But he was very dead.

“Joshua, we are at the end of it,” said Vasquez, boxing his ears. “Joshua!”

The roar in his head grew louder. The blood in Faraday’s mouth welled and spilled over like a syrup, all slow-like. Vasquez had kissed that mouth less than a day past. He wiped the blood away with his sleeve, already soaked in his own, but a thin line appeared within moments to replace it.

He lost time.

Somewhere on the other side of that divide, someone touched Vasquez’s shoulder and tried to pull him away. “Nothing you can do, my friend,” said Horne. “He committed himself with bravery to this sacrifice, but it was knowingly given.”

Vasquez reeled from him—thought _knowingly given_ —thought about his guns waiting on their Sabbath. He pushed Horne’s knee although the man’s bulk didn’t give. Got his hands on Faraday’s corpse again, digging into the pale flesh like he could claw color back into it. “I’ll ask for him back—” he started.

“I don’t think it works that way,” said Horne.

“It doesn’t,” Red Harvest said.

Vasquez ignored his newfound friends as they converged on him in that way a storm would: rising pressure and sudden cutting windfall. He raked through Faraday’s dirty hair, the elemental smell of him present even beneath the sickly saccharine gore, and kissed his temple hard, mouthing the words before they found air, shaping them on the go. 

“My darling,” he whispered, “ _oh_ to have more time. To have one more day, one year, one life. But of course, these are the expected thoughts of a man who has lost what he’s only just gained. But surely, what is one more breath? What is a skip of his heartbeat, then two? Such little things. A butterfly would beat its wings with more effort. To take the breath I could give you and only ensure it might reach those lungs—so simple.”

Billy put his palm on his back. “Enough,” he said, softly.

But he could _feel_ the slow turn of some pondering, curious thing, no different from his guns. It wasn’t enough. But something was listening.

“What would it be worth?” Vasquez demanded of it. “I will make you a deal—any deal. One for one of mine? That is fair, no? One for three of another’s? There are many men who deserve worse today who may still draw some breath.”

No—it drew back—shrunk into a bare wisp. Not these things, then.

“It won’t be enough,” said Goodnight quietly.

Vasquez felt something in him splinter. He whirled from Faraday’s body and set into Goodnight—the Angel of Death, the shadow that converged on the town and nearly doomed them all to ruin—grabbing him with tacky, bloody hands.

“Take it _back_ ,” Vasquez snarled, shaking Goodnight by his coat. 

Profound grief lined the crags in Goodnight’s face. He was unmovable, though, a mountain grown into its moors. “I can’t, son. It doesn’t work that way.”

“No! Take it back!”

“Vasquez,” Sam Chisolm said, weight put on his name. It did nothing to calm him—only spiraled the panic that was overtaking Vasquez.

“There must be a way,” he panted. “You are all men of impossible things. _We_ are men of impossible things. There must be something.”

“Not a single one of us is immortal,” said Horne. “Never has been, never will be. Some things are still the Lord’s domain. We are yet his creatures: of blood, of organs, of the promise of paradise.”

Vasquez reeled from Goodnight, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and taking deep breaths. He felt as if every part of him were clamoring for release from his body, unhappy with what was suddenly too small a space. 

“I will not accept this,” he said, voice trembling.

Sam Chisolm laid his palm over Vasquez’s shoulder. “He came into this knowing he wouldn’t have the protection of the tale. Been climbing too high, too fast, for too long. He wanted it to be his choice. It wasn’t a bad one, Vasquez. He died for something bigger than himself. Doesn’t get much—”

“It’s not about him,” Vasquez said.

“I’m sorry?”

Vasquez lowered his hands from his face. He felt, all at once, an incredible calm. “It’s not about him,” he repeated in dawning realization. “It’s not his tale.”

His six companions looked at him uncertainly. They didn’t understand yet. That was okay because they didn’t have to. _Vasquez_ understood what he had to do.

Faraday’s body remained an odd assortment of parts and clothes, but it was yet dear to him. He knelt on the ground beside it, jaw set and something—something bigger than his bones, stronger than he knew—waking up inside of him. He remembered it now. It had been in him before when he freed himself from the cellar in Fly Rookery and ascended the crooked stairs, knowing the ranger would be there, thinking him cowed. It had been in him when he left his family at thirteen, staring out across the plains and knowing to cross them would likely mean never seeing those he loved again. It had always been in Vasquez. This calling, pure and bullheaded. This wonderful, horribly certainty of action.

And for the first time, he would not run from its claim.

“This is not his story,” said Vasquez, “because it’s _mine_.” He lifted his voice and knew the others were listening, knew the townspeople would hear it, too, as far and in mourning as they were. “I was born in the mesquite bosques on the Rio Sonoyta. We were rich beggars, Sam Chisolm—no money but all the resources of the soul and body—but I left them for the wind’s calling. I went from town to town, helping others in need. A wintered home is as valuable as gold to the right person. When Fly Rookery was terrorized by a corrupt ranger who prayed on its people, I tracked him down, for no man is above the law and sometimes it means stepping out of the law to see that the balance is restored. I might have died at his cruel hands, but I escaped and killed him before he could do the same to another. I evaded the hunters, the lawmen, the noose. I came when called on by the likes of Sam Chisolm to join the venture to save Rose Creek from the Blackstones. I built the fire that drew Jack Horne out of his solitude. I fortified the church and rebuilt its walls and lit a spark to the idea that tomorrow was worth today. I shot and killed McDunn, leader of the Blackstones’ army, sending him straight into a coffin long waiting his frame.”

He said, too, “I kissed Joshua Faraday, quicksilver with his tongue and his bullets. I cobbled a place for him in my heart. I do not know how that place may grow—but he is a part of my story and _it’s not over yet_.”

The storm grew inside of him, pale twisting roots finding leverage alongside his arteries until at last something broke. It was a clean, fresh break. All at once, Vasquez could breathe. All at once, Vasquez was _more_.

“My name is Everado Vasquez,” he said. “And those will be the first of many.”

 

**lxxiii.**

 

“Jesus wept,” rasped Faraday, staring blankly at the torn sky. “Could someone shut him up?”

He was surprised he wasn’t dead. He was surprised to have heard the words— _cobbled a place for him in my heart_ —although perhaps he wasn’t so surprised that a Good Samaritan might choose them to confess a degree of feeling. And he was not surprised at all when Vasquez cried out his name, seized him by the shoulders, and shook him like he was a wet hat.

“Ow,” Faraday said, and laughed. “ _Ow_ , could you please—can you stop? I’m not dead but everything sure as hell _hurts_.”

“Now that you’re back to life, I’m going to kill you myself,” Vasquez told him. 

The others were crowded around them, at first stunned but following up with exclamations of joy, confusion, wonder. Faraday even caught sight of Goodnight Robicheaux himself, hand over his mouth, tears mayhaps in his eyes. He pondered if he might be the first to survive the Angel of Death’s shadow. He wondered, too, what it meant to be under the flimsy protection of being a part of Vasquez's newborn story, and whether the luck could possibly hold through Faraday's typical antics. It wasn't a loophole he had heard of; the unknown dangers concerned him. But these were wonderings for another day.

He slung his arm over Vasquez and grinned up at them all. Might’ve just been something in the air—his vision was a mite blurry, too.

 

**lxxiv.**

 

They stayed in Rose Creek another four days. One day to rest and recover from the ordeal. One day to bury the dead. One day to help the people rebuild, which comprised mostly Vasquez hurrying from one building to the next as if he was possessed by far too many calls for aid to satisfy them. Faraday watched him from the window beside his bed on the second floor of the saloon, barking a laugh every time the dumbass stopped in the street and looked harried. It probably hadn’t even occurred to him that he didn’t need to try quite so hard anymore. Not now that he was Named.

The fourth day, Faraday hung a white flag (artfully repurposed from his pillow) out the window until Vasquez burst into the room, irritated and sunburnt. “What are _doing_?” he demanded.

“Come to bed, you idiot,” said Faraday.

Vasquez hovered in the doorway. He blinked, then covered his forehead with his palm. The breath he took looked painful, more like a hiccup. “There are things I need to…”

“Come to bed,” Faraday said again, gentler.

(The fourth day, well, that was theirs.)

 

**lxxv.**

 

Dawn broke watery and pink across the sands, chasing the last vestiges of the night out to the corners of the world. Sam paused long enough to drink his fill of it as he loaded his saddlebags. Seemed like, in a funny way, it was the first sunrise he’d experienced in a long time. Not just seen, but _felt_.

He thought about how his mama would’ve liked it. She sure would have.

Around him, the others were packing their things, quiet in the early hour. They’d hoped to ride out of town before the townspeople woke to see them off, although Teddy Q, only slightly worse for the wear, had been the one to wake them early enough to see to it. Sam knew he couldn’t take one more whispered, reverent _thank you, Mr. Chisolm_ , and suspected the others felt the same. Horne, in particular, had taken to hiding in his room the last few days. _Not right that I should be here_ , he’d told Sam. _But here I am. There must be something left for me in this wide, wide wilderness that doesn’t need tested in blood or prayer._

Sam understood something of that. If pressed, he’d admit he hadn’t expected to survive Rose Creek and what it represented for him. In his heart of hearts, he thought this tale would be his last; vengeance so often came with a price and Bogue’s death brought him in full circle, creation to finish.

But here he was, alive and hardy. There must be something left for him to find, too.

Just as he thought they’d made a clean escape, Emma Cullen herself walked up through the undertaker’s yard, now devoid of coffins. She was wearing a new dress and her hair was long and free. She smiled when she saw them. That’s when Sam knew. Swoop in his stomach. Sun too bright in his eyes. Whole world unbent itself.

Sam smiled. “Emma Cullen,” he said—like that, her full name.

“Sam Chisolm,” she said.

“Come to see us off?” Faraday asked, visibly cheered despite the hour. He was sitting steady on his horse, but he still held himself gingerly.

“For now,” she said, sweeping her hair out of her eyes. “Later… Who knows? Maybe you’ll meet me on the road someday soon.”

“You’d leave Rose Creek?” Billy asked, surprised.

Emma Cullen gave it some thought. “Some part of me will always be here. With Matthew. But something tells me I won’t want to stay in one place for too long. I feel as though…”

“The world is calling,” said Vasquez.

“The calling is calling,” Sam Chisolm agreed. “Harkening you onward.”

Picking at his horse’s mane, Red Harvest said, perhaps the truest of them all, “We are made of stories. We live and tell our stories to others. Then we live a little longer, a little further. And we tell others’ stories, too. They live a little longer, a little further. They stay in the places we grow them.” He looked up from the mane, cheeks freshly painted, the colors lively and grained under the new sun. “Go as far as the way takes you, Emma Cullen. It’s only a circle.”

Her eyes cleared. She reached out and clasped Red Harvest’s wrist: kind, perfunctory. “It’ll all be waiting for me, won’t it?”

“Well, I, for one, will welcome your company, my dear,” said Goodnight. “Who knows what we men will get up to without a woman’s good influence?”

“Blasphemy,” Faraday said. “Outrage. Heinous crime.”

Emma Cullen laughed, the sound the only light part of her. But nevertheless, Sam thought she might be a little less broken under her grief and hardness—a little more capable of bearing its anchor. He tipped his hat to her and held her gaze for some time, until the mirth disappeared and was replaced with warmth.

At last, she said, “Until then, Sam.”

“Until then,” he echoed.

The sun was climbing steady as they rode out under stringy, strained clouds and the promise of a western wind. Sam marveled at the newness of the world as it came to him; for the first time in so many years, he had no idea what would happen next.

West was as good a direction as any.


End file.
